ecame the favourite province of the caliph. Then was inaugurated the
period of Persian supremacy, during which Islam was laid open to the
full current of alien ideas and culture. The incitement came, however,
not from the people, but from the prince: it was in the light of court
favour that the colleges of Bagdad and Nishapur first came to attract
students from every quarter, from the valleys of Andalusia as well as
the upland plains of Transoxiana. Mansur, the second of the Abbasids,
encouraged the appropriation of Greek science; but it was al-Ma'mun, the
son of Harun al-Rashid, who deserves in the Mahommedan empire the same
position of royal founder and benefactor which is held by Charlemagne in
the history of the Latin schools. In his reign (813-833) Aristotle was
first translated into Arabic. Orthodox Moslems, however, distrusted the
course on which their chief had entered, and his philosophical
proclivities became one ground for doubting as to his final salvation.

In the eastern provinces the chief names of Arabian philosophy are those
known to the Latin schoolmen as Alkindius, Aliarabius, Avicenna and
Algazel, or under forms resembling these. The first of these, Alkindius
(_see_ KINDI), flourished at the court of Bagdad in the first half of
the 9th century. His claims to notice at the present day rest upon a few
works on medicine, theology, music and natural science. With him begins
that encyclopaedic character--the simultaneous cultivation of the whole
field of investigation which is reflected from Aristotle on the Arabian
school. In him too is found the union of Platonism and Aristotelianism
expressed in Neo-Platonic terms. Towards the close of the 10th century
the presentation of an entire scheme of knowledge, beginning with logic
and mathematics, and ascending through the various departments of
physical inquiry to the region of religious doctrine, was accomplished
by a society which had its chief seat at Basra, the native town of
al-Kindi. This society--the Brothers of Purity or Sincerity (Ikhwan us
Safa'i)--divided into four orders, wrought in the interests of religion
no less than of science; and though its attempt to compile an
encyclopaedia of existing knowledge may have been premature, it yet
contributed to spread abroad a desire for further information. The
proposed reconciliation between science and faith was not accomplished,
because the compromise could please neither party. The fifty-one
treatises of