The Rise and Decline of the Muslim Civilization 41
Already by the second half of the tenth century the acute and
manifest disunity of the Muslim East had encouraged the Byzan-
tine Empire, which 250 years before had been threatened at its very
heart by the Arab armies, to take the offensive against its enemies,
raid the Levant coasts, recover Cilicia, Cyprus and Antioch, and
push its frontiers into North Syria and east to the Euphrates. In
Hitti's words, 'in the first half of the eleventh century .. . political
and military confusion prevailed everywhere. Islam seemed
crushed to the ground.'1
Nor was this confusion confined only to externals. It penetrated
to the very core of the Muslim faith. The caliph al-Ma'mun, who
had founded the enlightened Bait al-Hikma in his enthusiasm for
the rationalist views of the Mu'tazila, had encountered the opposi-
tion of the rigorous theologians of Baghdad. Regarding this
opposition with considerable justification as obscurantist and
pernicious, the Caliph proceeded to impose on theologians and
lawyers the rationalist doctrine, that the Qur'an was created and not
eternal, by the illiberal mechanism of an inquisition.2 The death
of al-Ma'mun's successor was followed by an officially-supported
orthodox reaction, upholding the Qur'an and the Sunna as the only
valid sources of knowledge, and again enforced by inquisitorial
methods. The more extreme theologians, led by Ibn Hanbal, re-
j ected all the findings of exact science and philosophical speculation,
as leading to heresy, unbelief, and atheism. But speculation could
not be completely suppressed, and Islam could not exist in a self-
created vacuum. To justify its first principles to those Muslims of
an enquiring mind, and they were not a few, it had to resort to
those very methods of logical argument, derived from the Greek
philosophers, which the extreme reactionaries deplored. A com-
promise was attempted early in the tenth century by al-Ash'ari,
using logical argument in the demonstration of theological truth.
But while this satisfied a large central block of Muslim thought, it
offended on the one hand the philosophers, who were tending in-
creasingly to reject the Qur'an and Sunna where they conflicted
with the more subtle and plausible speculations of Aristotle and
later Greek philosophy; and on the other hand it outraged the fol-
lowers of Ibn Hanbal, who rejected any process of thought or argu-
ment, including al-Ash'ari's logical defence of Muslim revelation,
1 op. cit., 473.
* Encyclopaedia of Islam, art. Mihna.