bath.  Islam adopted the complete Roman bath, and made it an institution of daily life, a necessity for all classes.  Granada is the spot in Europe where to-day we find the most exquisite remains of Mohammedan culture, and, though the fury of Christian conquest dragged the harrow over the soil of Granada, even yet streams and fountains spring up there and gush abundantly and one seldom loses the sound of the plash of water.  The flower of Christian chivalry and Christian intelligence went to Palestine to wrest the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of pagan Mohammedans.  They found there many excellent things which they had not gone out to seek, and the Crusaders produced a kind of premature and abortive Renaissance, the shadow of lost classic things reflected on Christian Europe from the mirror of Islam.

Yet it is worth while to point out, as bearing on the associations of the bath here emphasized, that even in Islam we may trace the existence of a religious attitude unfavorable to the bath.  Before the time of Mohammed there were no public baths in Arabia, and it was and is believed that baths are specially haunted by the djinn—­the evil spirits.  Mohammed himself was at first so prejudiced against public baths that he forbade both men and women to enter them.  Afterward, however, he permitted men to use them provided they wore a cloth round the loins, and women also when they could not conveniently bathe at home.  Among the Prophet’s sayings is found the assertion:  “Whatever woman enters a bath the devil is with her,” and “All the earth is given to me as a place of prayer, and as pure, except the burial ground and the bath.” (See, e.g., E.W.  Lane, Arabian Society in the Middle Ages, 1883, pp. 179-183.) Although, therefore, the bath, or hammam, on grounds of ritual ablution, hygiene, and enjoyment speedily became universally popular in Islam among all classes and both sexes, Mohammed himself may be said to have opposed it.

Among the discoveries which the Crusaders made and brought home with them one of the most notable was that of the bath, which in its more elaborate forms seems to have been absolutely forgotten in Europe, though Roman baths might everywhere have been found underground.  All authorities seem to be agreed in finding here the origin of the revival of the public bath.  It is to Rome first, and later to Islam, the lineal inheritor of classic culture, that we owe the cult of water and of physical purity.  Even to-day the Turkish bath, which is the most popular of elaborate methods of bathing, recalls by its characteristics and its name the fact that it is a Mohammedan survival of Roman life.