of quicksilver and water.  City and country were full of conviviality, and of dancing to the lute and mandolin.  Instead of the drunken and gluttonous wassail orgies of their Northern neighbors, the feasts of the Saracens were marked by sobriety.  Wine was prohibited.  The enchanting moonlight evenings of Andalusia were spent by the Moors in sequestered, fairy-like gardens or in orange-groves, listening to the romances of the story-teller, or engaged in philosophical discourse; consoling themselves for the disappointments of this life by such reflections as that, if virtue were rewarded in this world, we should be without expectations in the life to come; and reconciling themselves to their daily toil by the expectation that rest will be found after death—­a rest never to be succeeded by labor.

In the tenth century the Khalif Hakein ii. had made beautiful Andalusia the paradise of the world.  Christians, Mussulmen, Jews, mixed together without restraint.  There, among many celebrated names that have descended to our times, was Gerbert, destined subsequently to become pope.  There, too, was Peter the Venerable, and many Christian ecclesiastics.  Peter says that he found learned men even from Britain pursuing astronomy.  All learned men, no matter from what country they came, or what their religious views, were welcomed.  The khalif had in his palace a manufactory of books, and copyists, binders, illuminators.  He kept book-buyers in all the great cities of Asia and Africa.  His library contained four hundred thousand volumes, superbly bound and illuminated.

Throughout the Mohammedan dominions in Asia, in Africa, and in Spain, the lower order of Mussulmen entertained a fanatical hatred against learning.  Among the more devout—­those who claimed to be orthodox—­ there were painful doubts as to the salvation of the great Khalif Al-Mamun—­the wicked khalif, as they called him—­for he had not only disturbed the people by introducing the writings of Aristotle and other Greek heathens, but had even struck at the existence of heaven and hell by saying that the earth is a globe, and pretending that he could measure its size.  These persons, from their numbers, constituted a political power.

Almansor, who usurped the khalifate to the prejudice of Hakem’s son, thought that his usurpation would be sustained if he put himself at the head of the orthodox party.  He therefore had the library of Hakem searched, and all works of a scientific or philosophical nature carried into the public places and burnt, or thrown into the cisterns of the palace.  By a similar court revolution Averroes, in his old age—­he died A.D. 1193—­was expelled from Spain; the religious party had triumphed over the philosophical.  He was denounced as a traitor to religion.  An opposition to philosophy had been organized all over the Mussulman world.  There was hardly a philosopher who was not punished.  Some were put to death, and the consequence was, that Islam was full of hypocrites.