on very widely in these early days of Islam. Here was a religion just as it were emerged from the desert, full of the fire of enthusiasm as no doubt it was in the case of many of its devotees, but absolutely naive in its conceptions of the world. Its astonishing success as a conquering community brought it at once into contact over a wide area and under conditions of the closest association with a culture much older and much more advanced than that out of which it had sprung. Continued success was giving it the leisure to reflect upon itself. And we see its followers in their arguments with Christians being driven back upon problems for which they had no solution. The necessity of adjusting itself to a general philosophy would no doubt have arisen in any case. But brought thus early into contact with the elaborate system of Christian theology, the lines of that adjustment must have been to some extent prescribed for it. Christian theology in a manner set the questions which Islam with its own different materials had to answer. Not only so, but the thought-world to which it had to adjust itself was no longer the thought-world of Arabia but soon came to be the same Hellenistic thought-world with which the Christian Church had had to grapple, and which in the East it had played a large part in forming.

The course of history decreed that it should not be in Syria or in Egypt that Hellenistic culture was introduced into Islam, but further to the East, in the lands where the Nestorian Church had worked, suffered, and flourished. The Omayyad caliphs had their seats in Syria.

But while they ruled, interest in Greek thought and knowledge did not produce much result. Times were still unsettled. The caliphs did not much encourage such intellectual interest. One of the princes of the Omayyad house, Khalid b. Yazid, interested himself in alchemy. But he was an exception. These Omayyad princes were Arabs by race and sentiment, and their encouragement was given to the old desert poetry and traditions of Arab life.

It was after the Abbasides came to the throne in 132 A.H. that Islam really became international, and began to absorb the culture of the peoples it had conquered. They built a new city as their capital, the famous city of Baghdad, on the banks of the Tigris. It became the centre of the Muhammadan world, distinguished alike by its wealth, its luxury, its literary brilliance, and its schools of learning.

The impulse to this outburst of intellectual activity came from contact with the culture of the Eastern world. Persian and even Indian influences played their part. But more important than either of these was that form of Hellenism which the Syrians had transmitted to the East. The Syrians were not an original people, but they were diligent translators of Greek works.
There were three great centres of Greek learning in the East before the rise of Islam. One was Harran (or Charrae), which was a heathen city, surrounded though it was by Christian influences. There Greek science especially had found zealous cultivators. Another was Nisibis, the best-known school of the Nestorian Church,