d great respect for religion, and especially for Islam, as a
valuable popular substitute for science and philosophy, the charge could
hardly be rebutted (as will be shown later), and the Amir of the
Faithful could scarcely afford openly to favor a heretic. Averroes was
accordingly deprived of his honors, and banished to Lacena, a Jewish
settlement near Cordova--a fact which gives coloring to the belief that
he was of Jewish descent. To satisfy his fanatical subjects for the
moment, the Khalif published severe edicts not only against Averroes,
but against all learned men and all learning as hostile to religion. For
a time the poor philosopher could not appear in public without being
mobbed; but after two years, a less fanatical party having come into
power, the Prince revoked his edicts, and Averroes was restored to
favor. This event he did not long survive. He died on 10th December
1198, in Marocco. Here too he was buried; but his body was afterward
transported to Cordova, and laid in the tomb of his fathers. He left
several sons, more than one of whom came to occupy important positions.

Averroes was the last great Muslim thinker, summing up and carrying to
its conclusions the thought of four hundred years. The philosophy of
Islam, which flourished first in the East, in Basra and Bagdad
(800-1100), and then in the West, Cordova, Toledo, etc. (1100-1200), was
a mixture of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism, borrowed, under the
earlier Persianizing Khalifs, from the Christian (mainly Nestorian)
monks of Syria and Mesopotamia, being consequently a naturalistic
system. In it God was acknowledged only as the supreme abstraction;
while eternal matter, law, and impersonal intelligence played the
principal part. It was necessarily irreconcilable with Muslim orthodoxy,
in which a crudely conceived, intensely personal God is all in all.
While Persian influence was potent, philosophy flourished, produced some
really great scholars and thinkers, made considerable headway against
Muslim fatalism and predestination, and seemed in a fair way to bring
about a free and rational civilization, eminent in science and art. But
no sooner did the fanatical or scholastic element get the upper hand
than philosophy vanished, and with it all hope of a great Muslim
civilization in the East. This change was marked by Al-Ghazzali, and his
book 'The Destruction of the Philosophers.' He died in A.D. 1111, and
then the works of Al-Farabi, Ibn-Sina, and