called into existence amongst the Moslem people by the
patronage of their more liberal princes, and kept alive by the
intrepidity and zeal of a small band of thinkers, who stood suspected
and disliked in the eyes of their nation. Their chief claim to the
notice of the historian of speculation comes from their warm reception
of Greek philosophy when it had been banished from its original soil,
and whilst western Europe was still too rude and ignorant to be its home
(9th to 12th century).

Origin.

In the course of that exile the traces of Semitic or Mahommedan
influence gradually faded away, and the last of the line of Saracenic
thinkers was a truer exponent of the one philosophy which they all
professed to teach than the first. The whole movement is little else
than a chapter in the history of Aristotelianism. That system of
thought, after passing through the minds of those who saw it in the hazy
light of an orientalized Platonism, and finding many laborious but
narrow-purposed cultivators in the monastic schools of heretical Syria,
was then brought into contact with the ideas and mental habits of Islam.
But those in whom the two currents converged did not belong to the pure
Arab race. Of the so-called Arabian philosophers of the East, al-Farabi,
Ibn-Sina and al-Ghazali were natives of Khorasan, Bokhara and the
outlying provinces of north-eastern Persia; whilst al-Kindi, the
earliest of them, sprang from Basra, on the Persian Gulf, on the
debatable ground between the Semite and the Aryan. In Spain, again,
where Ibn-Bajja, Ibn-Tufail and Ibn Rushd rivalled or exceeded the fame
of the Eastern schools, the Arabians of pure blood were few, and the
Moorish ruling class was deeply intersected by Jewish colonies, and even
by the natives of Christian Spain. Thus, alike at Bagdad and at Cordova,
Arabian philosophy represents the temporary victory of exotic ideas and
of subject races over the theological one-sidedness of Islam, and the
illiterate simplicity of the early Saracens.

Islam had, it is true, a philosophy of its own among its theologians
(see MAHOMMEDAN RELIGION). It was with them that the Moslem
theology--the science of the word (_Kalam_)--first came into existence.
Its professors, the _Mutakallimun_ (known in Hebrew as _Medabberim_, and
as _Loquentes_ in the Latin versions), may be compared with the
scholastic doctors of the Catholic Church. Driven in the first instance
to speculation in theology by the needs