of Omar, there is something about it of that patchwork pavilion.
It was based on Christian work, it was built with fragments,
it was content with things that fastidious architects call fictions
or even shams.

I frequently saw old ruined houses of which there only remained two walls
of stone, to which the nomads had added two walls of canvas making
an exact cube in form with the most startling incongruity in colour.
He needs the form and he does not mind the incongruity, nor does
he mind the fact that somebody else has done the solid part and
he has only done the ramshackle part. You can say that he is nobly
superior to jealousy, or that he is without artistic ambition,
or that he is too much of a nomad to mind living half in somebody
else's house and half in his own. The real quality is probably too
subtle for any simple praise or blame; we can only say that there
is in the wandering Moslem a curious kind of limited common sense;
which might even be called a short-sighted common sense.
But however we define it, that is what can really be traced through Arab
conquests and Arab culture in all its ingenuity and insufficiency.
That is the note of these nomads in all the things in which they
have succeeded and failed. In that sense they are constructive
and in that sense unconstructive; in that sense artistic and in that
sense inartistic; in that sense practical and in that sense unpractical;
in that sense cunning and in that sense innocent. The curtains they
would hang round Stonehenge might be of beautifully selected colours.
The banners they waved from Stonehenge might be defended with glorious
courage and enthusiasm. The prayers they recited in Stonehenge
might be essentially worthy of human dignity, and certainly a great
improvement on its older associations of human sacrifice. All this
is true of Islam and the idolatries and negations are often replaced.
But they would not have built Stonehenge; they would scarcely,
so to speak, have troubled to lift a stone of Stonehenge.
They would not have built Stonehenge; how much less Salisbury
or Glastonbury or Lincoln.

That is the element about the Arab influence which makes it,
after its ages of supremacy and in a sense of success, remain in a
subtle manner superficial. When a man first sees the Eastern deserts,
he sees this influence as I first described it, very present
and powerful, almost omnipresent and omnipotent. But I fancy that to me
and to others it is p