Chapter 10 THE SECOND ATTEMPT

ABOUT 1,400 years ago, a self-made businessman began the second major attempt to establish individual freedom. Born in the year 570 A.D., he was an orphan – of good family, but cheated out of his property inheritance. As a child, barefoot, ragged, and hungry, he worked 16 to 18 hours a day and slept on the bare ground under the sky. He had no schooling, but he had practical ability. He got ahead and, as time went on, became widely known and respected. He traveled, buying and selling goods throughout the greater part of the then-civilized world.

Babylon was long forgotten, and the Roman Empire had ceased to exist. Europe, sunk in the barbarism of the Dark Ages, was less important than Africa is today. Constantinople–surrounded by the thriving cities of Baghdad, Damascus, Antioch, Alexandria – had become the center of world trade.

To understand this man, think of a seasoned business executive of today who earns, say, $25,000 a year – a sufficient but not spectacular success. Shrewd, humorous, and friendly, he is more interested in human relations than in problems of trade. He marries his employer, a woman of business ability. Comfortably well-off at middle age, they retire to live, let’s say, in Miami.

He and his wife keep open house. They serve coffee to their friends. The entertainment is conversation. The host’s opinions are so unusual that for some three years he is rather reserved in stating his views, lest they sound too radical. But little by little, he begins to express himself more openly, and friendly arguments originating in his living room begin to spread over the town.

He agrees with Abraham and Christ: The pagan gods do not exist; there is only one God – the God of Truth and Rightness – who judges men but does not control them; each individual is self-controlling and responsible for his own acts; all men are brothers.

Radical Blasphemy

The man’s name was Mohammed. His ideas created terrific excitement because he was expressing them in Mecca, the shrine of the most renowned pagan gods.

From far and wide, pilgrims came to Mecca to worship a strange, heavy, black stone which was believed to have descended from the heavens. Lesser gods surrounded it, and the most famous poets of the day displayed their rhymes in the holy Kaaba that sheltered the sacred stone. Mecca made its living by serving pilgrims, just as Miami is supported by tourists. So Mohammed’s blasphemy not only shocked the more devout Meccans, but also the merchants and tradesmen had grave misgivings as to its effect on business.

But Mohammed went right on saying what he thought, pointing out that Abraham, Moses, and Christ had stated these same truths. He was convinced that the priests had corrupted Abraham’s teachings when they assumed authority over the Jews. Christ had attacked the priests and reasserted the truth. Now the priests were corrupting the teachings of Christ by assuming a controlling authority over the Christians. Mohammed concluded that formal organization brings the danger of corruption; that each person is responsible directly to himself for his thoughts, speech, and acts; that God will do the judging.

Sanctuary

The pagan priests pronounced their most blasting curses against Mohammed, but to no avail. The plain people thronged to Mohammed’s home in increasing numbers. The more “respectable” Meccans were increasingly alarmed, but Mecca was a sanctuary in which no blood might be shed. The subversive elements were not to be killed. All that might be done was to harass them, in the hope that they would leave. Many of Mohammed’s followers did leave, but this had an effect opposite to what had been hoped. Those who left spread Mohammed’s ideas to other places; and many visitors to Mecca spent their time listening to Mohammed instead of worshiping at the shrine of Kaaba.

Then, in spite of the ban against bloodshed in the holy sanctuary, Mecca’s more respectable citizens – including the tradesmen – took the law into their own hands. They organized a vigilance committee and stormed Mohammed’s home with drawn knives and sabers.

But Mohammed was no longer there. Together with his family and companions, without haste or confusion, he had made tracks for the South. Hot on the trail, the Meccans pursued him; but Mohammed, this time without leaving any tracks, had swung leisurely northward. He was headed for Medina, a small town in the palm groves, where people lived mostly on the date harvest and flocks of goats and sheep. For some time past, he had had a standing offer to come there and be its emir.

Medina was situated on an important road to Mecca. An increasing number of pilgrims stopped off to hear Mohammed, and he converted them to the belief that there is but one God and that the Meccans were idolators. This had serious economic repercussions. Mecca’s income was cut at its roots, and the city crashed into its worst depression. Its people concluded that they could not live in the same world with Mohammed’s ideology. Failing to realize that killing Mohammed would not kill his ideas, they prepared for war and set out to destroy Medina.

A Military Miracle

With archers, spearmen, and cavalry far outnumbering the total population of Medina, they quietly approached its outskirts before dawn. There was no sign of resistance. The little town lay quiet and sleeping, unaware of the impending danger.

The Meccan cavalry deployed, and, suddenly howling their war cry, they charged head-on. Then out of nowhere their onslaught was met with a terrific barrage of arrows, bringing down horses and riders in mid-charge. The attacking cavalry dissolved in a welter of fallen, dying, and dead. The survivors pulled out of it in confusion and took another look. But Medina still lay quietly sleeping, with not a defender in sight. This was a miracle! Nothing like it had ever happened before.

Mohammed had invented a new type of warfare. His men were hidden in trenches which completely surrounded the town. To charge into a trench was suicide. To leap it was to be surrounded. Volleys of arrows were futile – most of them sped only to earth.

The Meccans withdrew and tried to figure things out. Then, after a long period of consultation, they galloped furiously back and forth before the trenches – but beyond arrow-range – yelling threats and insults and daring the Medinans to come out and fight like men. Nobody did.

This went on for days. The Medinans had ample provisions and water. The Meccans soon consumed theirs. Finally, at their wits’ end and unable to think of anything else to do, they turned back toward Mecca, 200 miles away.

News of their unfought war probably reached there ahead of them. Certainly it traveled with the caravans as fast as camels could go – it was the kind of news that no one forgets to tell. Soon it had spread to all the bazaars of India, China, Persia, Arabia, Byzantium, Palestine, all northern Africa, and to every oasis in the Sahara.

After six years in Medina, Mohammed traveled back to Mecca as a peaceful pilgrim – but prudently accompanied by 30,000 good fighting men, amply armed. A deputation met him outside the city to welcome him to the holy sanctuary, in which no blood might be shed. The Meccans accepted his religion, and the pagan idols were removed from the Kaaba (630 A.D.). Two years later, Mohammed died.

Historians have never seemed able to explain the terrific expansive force of Mohammed’s influence. Carlyle marvels: “… as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what seemed black unnoticeable sand; but lo, the sand proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Grenada!”⁶

Contributions of the Saracens

Schoolbooks lay great emphasis on European history, ancient and modern; but no point is made of the fact that, when Europe was stagnating in the so-called Dark Ages, the world was actually bright with a civilization more closely akin to what we have in America than anything that had gone before. Thirty generations of human beings who believed in personal freedom created that civilization and kept it going for 800 years.

In the deserts and the mountains and the steamy fertile river valleys, from the Ganges to the Atlantic, these people were of all races and colors and classes, all creeds, all former cultures, all former empires. They included Buddhists, Christians, Moslems, Jews, Hindus, Mongolians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Armenians, Persians, Medes, Arabs, Greeks, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hittites, Africans, and hundreds of others whose ancient ancestors had worn the soil to dust before the earliest dawn of history.

There is no one name that correctly applies to all of these people. The Europeans, who hated them, called them “Saracens.”

The records of the much-maligned Saracens – their 800 years of civilization, their institutions, their methods, their ways of living – are locked in their common language, Arabic. Since American historians are European-minded, we get only glimpses of the Saracens’ world, seen through European misunderstanding and bitterness dating back to the Crusades. Because of the deep-seated prejudice, and in the interest of fair play, it seems appropriate to swing the pendulum the other way and present the Saracens’ side of the story.^*

It is to the Saracens that the world of today owes much of its science – mathematics, astronomy, navigation, modern medicine and surgery, scientific agriculture – and their influence led to the discovery and exploration of America.

In the world of the Saracens, no authority suppressed scientists, and no policeman harried them – nor did any government take care of them. They opened schools; and from Baghdad to Granada, students flocked to them. Some of these schools grew into great universities, and for hundreds of years they continued to grow.

Learning versus Teaching

The Saracen universities had no formal organization – Mohammed contended that too much organization leads to corruption. The rules were few. There were no standardized programs, no regular curriculums, no examinations. To guard against the fallacious idea that education ends with graduation, the Saracens’ schools granted no diplomas, no degrees. They were institutions, not of teaching, but of learning. Students went there to acquire knowledge, just as Americans go to grocery stores to buy food.

Classes were held on an open-house basis. Anyone in quest of knowledge was free to wander about and listen. If he decided to remain, he picked a teacher and privately discussed with him what he wanted to learn and what he should study, and they agreed upon a fee. If, after joining the class, he didn’t get the knowledge he wanted, he stopped paying the teacher and went to another teacher or another university. When he had learned what he thought he ought to know, he quit school and put his new knowledge to practical test.

For 800 years, the Saracens’ schools and universities proceeded on the principle of freedom – on the basis of voluntary agreement between teacher and student. They offered all the learning of the past, with special emphasis on scientific knowledge.

One of the outstanding characteristics of the Saracens was their ability to build on the experiences of others. They studied the works of Aristotle, Galen, Euclid. They took unto themselves the past discoveries and techniques of the Greeks, the Chinese, the Romans – and usually found ways to improve upon them.

For example, consider the question of numerals: The figures that you find on an adding machine, or on the upper row of typewriter keys, or on the pages of this book are known as Arabic numerals.

Although handed down to us by the Saracenic Arabs, our numerals are really of Hindu origin. The Greeks and the Romans had seen the Hindu symbols in India; but they stuck to the clumsy Roman numerals and continued to do their adding, subtracting, and multiplying by clicking little balls along wires, as the Chinese still do. Not so with the Saracens. They seized upon the simple Hindu numbers and improved them. It is only when people are free that they begin to look for labor-saving methods. (See page 218.)

Priceless Zero

Not the least of the Saracens’ contributions to our modern civilization is that their free minds were first to grasp the mathematical concept that the absence of a number – nothing – is itself a number. They invented zero, without which science as we know it today could hardly exist.

Offhand, that may sound a bit far-fetched; but think it over, and ask yourself what would happen in this modern world of meticulous calculations if we were compelled to discard the ciphers and the decimal points and go back to Roman numerals.^*

Having established the concept of zero, the Saracens proceeded to develop arithmetic. Then they added algebra, including quadratics. To Euclid’s geometry, they added plane and spherical geometry and trigonometry. Applying these to sun, moon, and stars, they produced astronomy. They built observatories across three continents, studied the heavens, recorded their observations, and put them to practical use.

They deduced the shape of the earth and its movement around its axis and around the sun, and they gave to Europeans the information that the earth is round, along with calculations of its measurements. They invented the sextant and the magnetic compass, which made possible the navigation of their vessels on the open seas, beyond the sight of land.

They provided Christopher Columbus with the instruments and the charts which he took with him when he sailed west in search of a new route to India. The Saracens’ calculations of latitude were very accurate, but of longitude not quite so good – which caused Columbus and his backers considerable embarrassment. (See page 138.)

The Saracen navigator of a thousand years ago would have little trouble understanding the charts and instruments on today’s most modern ocean liner. He would see improvements, but the only instrument that might really baffle him is the gyrocompass. He would be able to use it all right, but he wouldn’t understand the electric energy that keeps it spinning.

Advances in Medicine

Rivaling their work in astronomy and navigation, the Saracens made important contributions in the field of health and sanitation. They translated Galen’s works into Arabic for use in their schools and did original research in medicine and surgery. Nine hundred years ago, they were using the medical pharmacopoeia of today, excepting only the recently discovered chemical compounds. There was not another great advance in medicine from the time of the Saracens until the American century.

From the Ganges to the Atlantic, they built medical schools and hospitals. While one of these was flourishing at Salerno, Italians a little farther north are credited with doing the first surgical operations ever performed in Europe. Since dissection was forbidden in Europe, the Italians doubtlessly learned their anatomy from the Saracens. Surely no doctor, even in the Dark Ages, would have had the nerve to cut open a patient without some notion of what he was going to find inside.

It was the Saracens who discovered the local anesthetics used in these operations. The next great attack upon pain was the discovery of general anesthesia, first used in a surgical operation by Dr. Crawford Long in 1842, at Jefferson, Georgia.

In the 13th century, the doges of Venice are credited with the introduction of quarantine against contagious disease – and that also was out of keeping with the religious thought then prevailing in Europe, which held pestilence to be God’s punishment for sin.

The explanation lies in the fact that the thriving city of Venice was carrying on a prosperous trade with the realistic Saracens. Indeed, it is significant that the whole Renaissance, the so-called “revival of learning” in Europe, should have arisen so inexplicably in the long, narrow peninsula of Italy, with Saracen civilization brilliant at its tip and with its every port opening into the Saracens’ sea.

The Saracens Invade Europe

Precisely 100 years after Mohammed died, some of the Saracens moved into central France. A frantically assembled European army attacked and stopped them near Tours; but they remained in southern France and in Spain. The fanatic Europeans looked upon them as followers of the Antichrist – the mystic body of Satan on earth – and the Saracens regarded the Europeans as crude barbarians.

In Spain – at Cordova, Granada, and Seville – the Saracens built great centers of learning and art, science, production, and commerce. From India and Africa and Cathay, students came to the universities in Spain; and from Spain, students went to the universities in Cairo, Baghdad, and Delhi.

Farmers in fertile southern Spain poured into the cities an increasing abundance of food and raw materials; and out of the cities poured an increasing wealth of woolens, linens, cottons, silks, mosaics, enamels, porcelains, glass, and gloves. Ships thronged the harbors – unloading spices and ivory and camphor from India, tempered steel and wrought silver and brass from Damascus, horses from Arabia, and saddles of leather softer than velvet from Morocco.

Five Centuries of Progress

Progress continued for 500 years, until Saracenic Spain was three times as old as the United States is today. Then from darkest Europe, a half-million fighting men set out to attack the Saracens in faraway Palestine.

This unprovoked aggression began a world war which lasted until the United States Marines subdued the Barbary Pirates in the Mediterranean harbor of Tripoli in the year 1804. Pirates they were, but they didn’t know it. They thought they were still fighting the war which the Europeans had launched against their forefathers.

The Crusades

For more than a century, officials of the Church had been trying their best to make peace in Europe. First, they decreed the “Peace of God,” but no one paid any attention. Then they declared the “Truce of God,” which called for a long week end lasting from Wednesday night until Monday morning.

The idea was to induce the ruling classes – the barons and the knights – to take that much time out from their fighting, giving the farmers and craftsmen and traders a chance to work in peace and perhaps provide enough food to keep things going. But on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the barons and the knights could get on with the job of fighting for their frontiers, killing off useful peasants and serfs in the process.

It was a good idea, but it didn’t work out because the Church was not strong enough to enforce it.

So Pope Urban II, perhaps in sheer desperation, summoned all the barons to a great council and made a speech that roused them to frenzy. He called on them to put aside their petty quarrels and to unite in a common cause – to free the Holy Land. He offered forgiveness of all sins to every man who enlisted, and he promised eternal reward to any who died in the effort. His speech deeply moved his listeners and aroused a natural yearning to get out of Europe and into heaven. The result was an outburst of fervor and fanaticism, the like of which the world has never known – before or since.

The Saracens had held the Holy Land for 500 years; and during all that time, Christians had worshiped unmolested at its Christian shrines. Jerusalem has always been a holy city to Moslems, who have a deep reverence for Abraham, Moses, Gideon, Samuel, and Christ. Christian shrines are also Moslem shrines.^*

But these facts were evidently unknown to the Crusaders, who were dominated by the spirit of the vigilance committee run amuck.

After killing Jews and nonbelievers all through the Germanies, nearly half a million Crusaders crossed the Bosporus into Turkey. They besieged Nicaea, but the Christian Emperor in Constantinople allied himself with the Saracens and sent his troops to defend the city.

On to Antioch

Then the Crusaders moved on to ancient Antioch. They devastated the country so thoroughly that they themselves almost starved. It is reported that under the eyes of the guards on Antioch’s walls, some of them cooked and ate the flesh of Saracens they had killed. They were unable to take the city by force, but a Christian commander of the Moslem troops let them in secretly by night. They massacred most of the population; and while bodies rotted in the streets and wells, a mysterious sickness came upon them.

As they resumed their march toward Jerusalem, they were astonished to find that the homes and villages along the way were deserted. How had the Saracens known they were coming? This was a land of devils and black magic. Their worst suspicions were confirmed when an envoy from the Sultan of faraway Egypt met them en route with a conciliatory message which urged that they fulfill their vow to the Pope and enter Jerusalem as peaceful and welcome pilgrims.

South of Beirut, they saw the black magic with their own eyes. In the sky, a hawk had wounded a pigeon. The pigeon fell to the ground. The incredulous Crusaders found, attached to its leg, a silver cylinder which contained a bit of paper bearing mysterious writing. A Syrian Christian guide translated it for them:

“The Amir of Akka to the lord of Caesaria, greeting. A race of dogs, stupid and quarrelsome, hath passed by me, marching without order. As thou lovest the Faith, do what thou mayest, and have others do, all that may hurt them. Send this word to other citadels and fortresses.”⁷

The Massacre at Jerusalem

In two years, the Crusaders had fought only two battles and a few skirmishes. They had unsuccessfully besieged two cities and had taken Antioch by treachery. Out of almost 500,000 invaders, only 30,000 reached Palestine.

There they found palm groves, vineyards, and orchards of figs and sweet pomegranates; but the villages and towns and white-walled Ramleh were deserted. A hundred Crusaders rode into Bethlehem and found it to be a Christian town, built around the Cathedral of the Virgin Mary. Monks and priests entertained them royally. Then they rode back toward Jerusalem and came to the peaceful Church of the Blessed Mother of Christ, in the ancient Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives.

For five weeks, they attacked gray-walled Jerusalem. They hauled timbers from 30 miles away and built movable battle towers. Under a rain of boiling pitch and Greek fire, they advanced their towers and rushed across blazing drawbridges to engage in hand-to-hand fighting on the walls. They took the city; and for two days and nights, they slaughtered men, women, and children in houses and in churches, down alleys, over roofs. On the sunken pavement around the Mosque of Omar, their horses charged fetlock-deep in human blood.

Only one little group of citizens survived the massacre. They were of Christian faith. Huddled together, awaiting death, unable to speak the foreign tongue of the bloody killers, they sang a mass in Greek; the Crusaders, recognizing the tune, swerved by and left them alive.

Peaceful Christians

The Crusaders found Christians everywhere they went – for the simple reason that Christians had been there all along. For a thousand years, Christians had been living peacefully among the Moslems, along with Armenians, Albanians, Greeks, Copts, Marenites, Druses, Jews, Parsis, Hindus, to mention a few. “Let there be no violence in religion,” Mohammed had cautioned. “… fight for the religion of God against those who fight against you; but transgress not by attacking them first.”⁸

It was the Europeans who had the habit of starting wars; it was the Europeans who massacred heretics, down to the last infant. They killed the Albigenses, the Waldenses, the Socinians, the Huguenots, the Covenanters, and many others. Five hundred years after the Crusades, both Protestants and Catholics were alternately seeking refuge in the American wilderness to save their lives from European fanaticism.

Before taking Jerusalem, the Crusaders met the Saracens only once in open battle. From then on, they respected them. In contrast to the bludgeoning Europeans, they wore light helmets of damascene steel, and their body-armor was of gilded steel mesh, which would turn the swiftest arrow but which was so sheer that a whole suit of it crumpled into scarcely more than a handful. The Saracen fighters were lean, agile, quick. Their horses were small and swift; their swords, thin and flexible.

The iron-armored ranks of Christendom would charge forward with the full-throated roar: “God wills it!” But the Saracens, flying their green silk banners, swept in like a wave and struck at the flank, with a ululating cry that sounded to the Crusaders like the howl of wolves: “La ilaha illa-l Lah” – There is but one God!

Bewildering Discoveries

When the Crusaders left Jerusalem to attack Ascalon, they were already adopting the Saracens’ battle tactics. But they were still unable to guess the uses of their loot. At Antioch, their bewilderment had been pitiable. They sat down on beds and leaped up terrified by the movement beneath them – they had never seen a mattress before. They were mystified by the draperies, carpets, cushions, leathers, linens; by magical chiffons that clung like cobwebs to their fingers and a silk that changed its color in the light.

The unknown metals and strange utensils were equally puzzling. Gingerly they sniffed at flaming liquids in queer containers – they had never seen an oil lamp before. They tasted and spat out a white powder, delicious but perhaps poisonous – it was sugar. In small gold boxes, they found tubes with jewelled stoppers, containing other strong-tasting substances. How could they understand cosmetics? The cosmetics used by the Saracen women were quite similar to those of today. No other women in history were so well-groomed, until the present generation of Americans.

Contrasts

In contrast to the European castles, with their rude stone walls and their floors littered with rotting reeds and bones, the Crusaders came into rooms that were like jewels – with tile floors and mosaic ceilings. Faintly scented air came through delicate latticework windows which permitted one to look out, though no one could look in. The lattice was of sandalwood.

Rummaging and wondering, dragging out and killing some quivering thing – a child or a slave – the invaders came upon cups which they mistook for rare jewels and which, in their excited grips, they crushed to splinters that cut the hand. For the first time, they learned about glass.

This, indeed, was a country of demons and devils; all Europe heard that it was.

Saracenic Cleanliness

The most amazing thing to the Crusaders, however, must have been the cleanliness. It seemed that everyone was always bathing. The Crusader knew what it was to get wet in the rain or when crossing a river, and the knight recalled the formal bath that had been a part of the ceremonial into knighthood. But the heathen Moslem bathed five times a day.

It was Mohammed’s idea; he was almost fanatically clean. Probably in reaction from the filthy Christian ascetics of the time, he insisted that a clean, healthy body is essential to a clear mind and a pure spirit; and as a part of his plan to keep religion on an informal, personalized basis, he tied physical cleanliness to prayer. Let every man repeat five times daily the truth that there is but one God – no pagan gods – and before saying this, let him wash in running water. He pointed out that one cannot wash clean in standing water because it becomes dirty. Then, with a practical eye to trade, he added that men traveling through the deserts should scrub themselves with sand.

So the Crusaders came into a country where everyone was clean. Fountains were everywhere. Moslems sensibly did not interrupt business to recall that there are no pagan gods – they bathed and repeated that fact in their streets and bazaars. Anyone who wanted a fountain built one. Everything was on the basis of individual initiative and voluntary co-operation.^*

Mosques were built in the same spontaneous way. There was no more organization about a mosque than there was about a Saracen university. Men in the neighborhood kept the mosque in repair if they liked; if they didn’t, it fell into ruin in time. Philosophers, poets, and idlers sat in its quiet courtyard, by its splashing fountain. At dawn, noon, and sunset, and in mid-morning and mid-afternoon, someone climbed the minaret and called out that there is no god but God. Beneath him in the city or countryside, everyone paused and repeated the fact. Some repeated it in the mosque, after bathing at its fountain; someone may or may not have read aloud from the Koran.

Prosperity in the Dark Ages

Theirs was a spontaneous religion based on a sense of reality, springing from and depending upon the personal self. And for 800 years, during the period when the greater part of Europe was submerged in the Dark Ages, this religion produced the most brilliant scientific progress and the greatest material prosperity that had ever been known to man.

Imagine the crusading knight who, after grabbing a kingdom in Syria, is dining for the first time in the palace of a neighboring emir. The knight is wearing harsh leather, coarse wool, and 80 pounds of iron armor on his unwashed body. He is in the habit of gnawing meat from a bone, tossing the bone over his shoulder to the dogs, then wiping greasy hands on his sleeves and guzzling down a hornful of ale. The courtyards, halls, and rooms no longer amaze him. They are like those he has looted. But what will he do when a servant offers him a silver bowl and holds poised above it a silver pitcher?

Before the Saracen ate, rose-scented water was poured over his hands, and he wiped them on linen damask or terry cloth – our bath towel. A servant placed an inlaid metal tray between host and guest and set on it a porcelain bowl of food. The Saracen ate with his fingers, as did the European, but he did not wipe them on his clothes. After each course, he washed his fingers and dried them on a fresh towel.

Not one dog sat scratching fleas and whining for bones. The floor of polished stone was bright and shining. On a raised dais, the host and guest sat on thick oriental rugs which were richly colored and spotlessly clean. (When a Saracen entered a house, he left his shoes outside.)

Scientific Farming

The foods were amazing and strange. There was a variety of meats, cooked with seasonings and sauces. There were salads and ices. There was an unknown drink in tiny cups – coffee, sugared and spiced. No European had ever before seen such a variety of cereals, vegetables, and fruits – rice, spinach, asparagus, lemons, melons, peaches – produced by the world’s first scientific farmers.

In Europe, oxen and women pulled wooden plows which merely scratched the earth, and the crop was whatever God might will. Half of the farm land always lay fallow – giving birth to a crop tires the earth, and it must rest.

But in the world of the Saracens, not an acre of arable land ever rested. From Cathay to the Atlantic, across three continents, the Saracen farmers were deep plowing and contour plowing, fertilizing, irrigating, and rotating crops. They poured into the markets an abundance of nearly every food that we have today and took in return a wealth of goods such as the world had never known before. These goods included damask linens, mohair, muslin, Syrian silks, morocco leather, oriental rugs, mosaics, inlaid woods, glassware, porcelains, enamels, filigree and wrought work in metals. Damascene steel was not equalled until very recently in the United States.

From the Saracens

We Americans owe directly to the Saracens our Californian and southwestern architecture, our cotton industry, our asphalt paving, and a long list of such things as beds, tables, table and bed linens, divans, sofas, glass, china, rugs, strawberries, peaches, ice cream. We speak Arabic when we say mattress, cotton, talcum, sugar, coffee, sherbet, naphtha, gypsum, benzine. Our cars are run, our streets are paved, our houses are furnished, and our bodies are clothed with things that the Saracens began to create a thousand years ago.

An Opportunity to Praise

Jerusalem was the first of the kingdoms established by the Crusaders, and the Christian kings were able to hold it with fewer than a hundred soldiers. As time went on, the invaders were dressing and living like Moslems. They melted into the civilization of the Saracens, and their sons grew up so tolerant that they raised no objection to Moslems worshiping in Christian churches.

But the new kingdoms set up by the Crusaders lasted less than a century; then the Emir of Palestine proposed an alliance with England. He offered his sister in marriage to Richard the Lion-Hearted, who was crusading at the time. But Richard was planning to return to England; and, in spite of all his lion-heartedness, he lacked the courage to face his fanatical subjects with a Moslem queen.

Upon his refusal, the Moslems attacked and took Jerusalem, but they did not sack it. As soon as its defenders surrendered, the Emir released his prisoners unharmed and gave them 40 days to dispose of their property and go back home. During these 40 days, the people of Jerusalem bitterly complained that the departing Christians were stealing everything in sight, and they demanded that the robbery be stopped. The Emir replied that if he stopped the robbery, the Christians would say that he had broken his word; but that if he did nothing to stop it, the Christians would have an opportunity to praise the goodness of the Moslem religion.

He left to the people the responsibility of protecting their individual property, and the Europeans got away with quite a lot of loot. But they also took back something that was of far greater value. It was the new concept of sportsmanship and gentility which they had learned from the Saracens.

Chivalry

Prior to the Crusades, it had never occurred to the invaders that a strong man need not be brutal.

The Saracens were fierce in battle, but they were not cruel. They did not kill the wounded; they did not torture their prisoners. When they struck down an opponent, it was not uncommon to help him up. (Read Sir Walter Scott.) They did not persecute Christians. They were honorable; they told the truth; they kept their word.

The English knights were especially impressed; and, due in no small measure to the lessons learned from the Saracens, the British aristocracy developed into one of the finest ruling classes the world has ever known.^*

In the meantime, subversive ideas were leaking into Europe from Saracenic Spain. Travelers from south of the Pyrenees brought these ideas into France and the Germanies; and European scholars were corresponding with Saracen scholars in the Spanish universities.

One of these dangerous ideas was that the earth is round – a planet among many planets spinning in space. This was contrary to the accepted teachings of the time, which were based on the pagan belief that an authority controls all things, including men. Such heresies had to be suppressed, and in most of Europe they were suppressed.

But the Italians were prospering from their trade with the Saracens, and they continued to deal with these men of greater knowledge and wider experience. The Saracens had better methods of navigating ships, quicker ways of computing costs and adding up bills. They transacted their business affairs over great distances and with incredible swiftness.

Pony Express

A European who traveled 18 miles in one day had something to write home about – had he known how to write. But a Saracen thought nothing of sending a parcel 200 miles and getting back a receipt on the following day. A thousand years ago, the Saracens’ pony express habitually covered 200 miles a day – anywhere on land, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. In a pinch, it could do 2,000 miles in eight days. Such speed over such a distance was not equalled until the year 1860, when the pony express ran from St. Joseph, Missouri to San Francisco.

The Saracens’ postal service was even swifter. Today you can see a remnant of it in Ragusa on the Dalmatian coast. Ragusa was one of the “free cities” which traders had set up in Italy just before the Renaissance. It is important to notice that trade – the exchange of material goods – is always an exercise of individual freedom. Production and trade are possible only to the extent that restraints upon personal freedom are absent.

All Were Welcome

These free cities were the only spots in Europe where men could manage their own affairs, and it was in these spots that religious freedom began to take root. While most of Europe was being torn by fanaticism and religious jealousies, traders of all faiths were building their churches in Ragusa – a Roman Catholic church, a Greek Catholic church, a Moslem mosque and fountain.

Even today, under the arcade of the ancient market place, above the door that once led to the offices of the city, can be seen a painting of Mother Ragusa – the free city. The colors are still clear and fresh. Grouped around Mother Ragusa’s knees, and equally enclosed by her arms, are children of all peoples – Norman, Mongolian, African, Slavic, Levantine. Below the portrait stands a marble bench on which three judges sat to hear and judge in public any complaints brought before them. They represented the free city. They were bound to judge all men with equal justice.

Ragusa prospered enormously. Its merchants rivaled and often outstripped the Venetians. When an earthquake totally demolished the city in the 16th century, it was rebuilt so rapidly that its prosperity was hardly interrupted. Ragusa was so rich and powerful that Spain sought the little city as an ally and ships from Ragusa sailed with the Spanish Armada against England.

Pigeon Mail

When rebuilding their city after the earthquake, the merchants improved its postal service. They built dovecots all along the top of the city’s double walls, and thousands of pigeons flutter around them even today. In common with other Saracen cities, Ragusa required every foreigner to contribute two carrier pigeons from his home town as an entrance fee at the city gates. These pigeons were filed in the dovecots under the name of their home town. When ships from Ragusa went to sea or when caravans set out on the long road to China, they took with them as many pigeons as might be required to pay the entrance fees to other cities and to carry back their reports. By carrier-pigeon mail, the salesman reported sales, trade news, business prospects, and his next address. Back at the “home office” in Ragusa, the replies, in sealed cylinders, were turned over to the pigeon master, who then selected the proper pigeon to send to the salesman’s next address.

This highly efficient postal service covered land and sea from Spain to India. For speed and privacy in communication, it was not surpassed until Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.

Roman post roads are justly famous and were excellent for their purpose – which was military. They were useful to the Roman state and to privileged families and classes. What is not so well known is that the Saracens built a network of highways to serve the practical needs of commerce and to connect their cities, which are still among the most beautiful in the world.

While their architects were creating dreams in marble, their scholars collected and exchanged rare manuscripts, and their traders extended their businesses throughout the civilized world. And all these complexes of free human energies, operating across three continents, were geared to the speed of the pigeon’s flight.

The dynamic civilization of the Saracens had never been equalled and was not surpassed until 300 years after it ceased to exist.

Why did it cease to exist? The answer or answers to that question should be highly valuable in advancing the American effort to establish the principles of freedom and liberty. Although hundreds of books have been written on the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans, so far as I can discover no historical analyst has ever developed a realistic account of the rise and fall of the Saracenic civilization.

Important Lessons

Barriers of language and deep-seated prejudices handed down from the time of the Crusades have obscured the important lessons that might be learned from this second attempt to set men free. The difficulty is increased by the fact that some of the reasons for its success are interwoven with the causes of its failure.

On the positive side, it seems that the anarchy of the Saracens, in contrast to that of the Israelites, was surrounded by certain restraints and was tempered with a belief in human brotherhood.

The majority of the people who were drawn together in the world of the Saracens had already been living in groups. They brought to their new civilization the traditional customs and habits of human association and human brotherhood, which they had inherited from the wide diversity of tribes and empires previously existing in the vast area between the Ganges and the Atlantic.

Group Anarchy

Thus, their anarchy might be described as the anarchy of groups, rather than the anarchy of persons. Individuals were not prevented from acting freely; but it seems that most of them chose to remain in tribal and family groups, voluntarily obeying many forms of authority which could not have been enforced. The different groups kept their old customs and traditions. They increased the natural authority of parents over children and the natural influence of wise and able men. Workers, traders, scholars, and others formed fraternal groups. The Saracens were great “joiners.”^*

They accepted Mohammed’s liberal views as rules of personal conduct and as guides to human association along informal lines. There were the emirs, who led their troops of volunteer militia and served as the political leaders for their groups; there were the caliphs – the word means successor (to Mohammed); and there were the cadis, or wise men, upon whom their neighbors relied for judgment.

Moslem Justice

Mrs. Lane observes:

“A Westerner who has seen a quarrel flare dangerously in an Arab bazaar will never forget it. One voice, one word, pierces that din of bargaining; the sound shocks the turmoil to utter silence. Out of it comes a mob-roar. ‘Brothers! you are brothers! Moslems, remember you are brothers!’ With that roar goes a mobrush. Get out of it, quick.

“It is over in a moment. Scores of hands tear the quarreling men apart, snatch the knives from their fists or sashes. An unperturbed din of bargaining rises again, while small crowds of men who can leave their own affairs surround the angry men and go with them to the nearest Cadi, who, if he wants to keep his reputation for wisdom, must then and there settle the quarrel in a way that satisfies everyone’s sense of justice.

“You admire the method, because it works. But it is not law.

“Actually it is the way men always, everywhere, keep the peace, when no one of them has a recognized right to use force. Then each one feels his responsibility. This is the way Americans kept the peace on the frontier, and keep it now on fishing and hunting trips and in clubrooms.”^3-b

Behind the Law

An essential difference between American and Saracenic civilizations appears in the marriage customs. Among the Saracens, marriage was made by family agreement, with the consent of the bride and groom. It was not a religious sacrament; nor was it a civil contract, although such a marriage included property settlements from both families. If it later became necessary to enforce the terms, it was up to the aggrieved family to do the enforcing as best it could. There was no legal machinery – no impersonal third party to whom the family might appeal. The only protection of property seems to have been possession of the property, personal honesty, and public opinion.

This is not so unusual as it may seem. Law or no law, always and everywhere, the basic protection of life and property is the general recognition of human rights – life, liberty, and ownership.

On the American frontier before there were any laws, settlers didn’t bother to lock their cabins; and the average citizen of today is not often within sight of a policeman. But in a complex civilization, human nature being what it is, the need sometimes arises for an impersonal third party, and then the policeman is a handy person to have around. His existence is a symbol of law and order – a reminder that the “bad man” will not be tolerated.

The Saracens had no police force. No state defended their civilization by military power. They had no civil law which men could rally to defend. There was no or ganization, no political structure, to hold together the millions of persons who for 800 years had been creating a vast and complex empire extending over three continents.

But in spite of their many shortcomings, there is no denying that the Saracens made a good “second attempt”; and it should be remembered that their civilization had its beginning, and reached its peak, during the period when Continental Europe was submerged in the barbarism of the Dark Ages.

But the days of the Saracens were numbered. Medieval Europeans had broken through the Pyrenees; and the spirit of the Crusaders – a white heat of religious fanaticism – was directed against the Saracens of Spain. Bloody killings, torture, purges, and mass deportation went on for years. At the mercy of the Inquisitors in the West and disrupted at its core by the barbarous attacks of the Turks, the world of the Saracens sank into stagnation.

But in the wake of this disintegration, there followed a highly significant result.

^* This chapter is based mainly on information gathered by Rose Wilder Lane, whose researches include personal contacts among remnants of former Saracenic tribes. Almost everything in it should be in quotes, except that I have taken liberties in condensing Mrs. Lane’s original text.

^* Today, any mathematician will tell you that without zero, there could be no mathematics. Without zero, Americans could have no engineering, no chemistry, no astronomy, no adequate measurement of substance, time, or space. Without zero, there would be no skyscrapers, no subways, no modern bridges, no automobiles, no radios. There would be no rayon, no cellophane, no aluminum, no electric refrigeration, no atomic power. Without zero, there could be no modern science–no modern world.

^* According to Mrs. Lane, a Moslem has stood guard at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre night and day for a thousand years, except at Easter – and still did when she was in Jerusalem. On Easter Day, the guard retires so that no Moslem presence profanes this holy time. Christians of all rival sects crowd the dark cavern of the church, each group allotted its space. Then, in the black dark, the miracle occurs – fire bursts from the tomb. Rushing to catch the miraculous flame on their candles, the sects trespass on space allotted to others; and in murderous fury, Christians fight Christians, and blood flows in the Holy Sepulchre. Then at sunset, when Easter Day is over, the Moslem guard returns, and all is peaceful for another year.

^* It should be borne in mind that Mohammed lived in the period 570-632 A.D. – about 800 years before the art of printing began to gain headway. Thus, his teachings have been variously interpreted and confused with the superstition and mysticism that characterized the Dark Ages. For example, the story of his going to the mountain when the mountain would not come to him probably had its origin in Mohammed’s insistence that the individual should do things for himself, instead of waiting for help from the supernatural – or from men in public office.

^* One of the returning Crusaders – an Englishman named Wilder, whose life had been chivalrously saved by an Arab foe – decreed that the name of his rescuer should be carried down through each succeeding generation of the Wilder family. Thus it is that Rose Wilder Lane’s father bore the name Almanzo – the original was probably El Manzoor. I got this story, not from Mrs. Lane, but from one of the delightful children’s books written by her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder; and I suspect that the daughter’s deep interest in the Saracens stems from the family tradition.

^* This same tendency is strikingly characteristic of Americans, who, as the intellectuals sneeringly observe, are the greatest “joiners” on earth. The American “Babbitt” spontaneously creates literally tens of thousands of free and voluntary associations of persons acting together for some mutual purpose: ladies’ aids, country clubs, fraternal orders, building and loan associations, mutual banks, farmers’ co-operatives, labor unions, chambers of commerce, parent-teacher associations – the list is endless. These free associations form the fabric of American social life; nearly every American belongs to several of them. American industry and commerce are organized on this same basis of free, mutual co-operation. General Electric, General Motors, U. S. Steel, Bell Telephone, Standard Oil, and the smallest store with one clerk – all were created and are maintained by the free will of persons working together for some common purpose, voluntarily accepting some authority which is not and cannot be enforced upon a single one of them.