Any fair estimate of Mohammedan influence must take account of the elements which it found in Northern Africa at the time of its conquests.  The states which border on the Mediterranean had once been powerful and comparatively enlightened.  They had been populous and prosperous.  The Phoenician colony in Carthage had grown to be no mean rival of Rome’s military power.  Egypt had been a great centre of learning, not only in the most ancient times, but especially after the building of Alexandria.  More western lands, like Numidia and Mauritania, had been peopled by noble races.

After the introduction of Christianity, Alexandria became the bright focus into which the religions and philosophies of the world poured their concentrated light.  Some of the greatest of the Christian fathers, like Augustine, Tertullian, and Cyprian, were Africans.  The foundations of Latin Christianity were laid by these men.  The Bishopric of Hippo was a model for all time in deep and intelligent devotion.  The grace and strength, the sublime and all-conquering faith of Monica, and others like her, furnished a pattern for all Christian womanhood and motherhood.

I do not forget that before the time of the Mohammedan invasion the Vandals had done their work of devastation, or that the African Church had been woefully weakened and rent by wild heresies and schisms, or that the defection of the Monophysite or Coptic Church of Egypt was one of the influences which facilitated the Mohammedan success.  But making due allowance for all this, vandalism and schism could not have destroyed so soon the ancient civilization or sapped the strength of the North African races.  The process which has permanently reduced so many once populous cities and villages to deserts, and left large portions of the Barbary States with only the moldering ruins of their former greatness, has been a gradual one.  For centuries after the Arab conquest those states were virtually shut off from communication with Europe, and for at least three centuries more, say from 1500 down to the generation which immediately preceded our own, they were known chiefly by the piracies which they carried on against the commerce of all maritime nations.  Even the Government of the United States was compelled to pay a million of dollars for the ransom of captured American seamen, and it paid it not to private corsairs, but to the Mohammedan governments by which those piracies were subsidized, as a means of supplying the public exchequer.  These large amounts were recovered only when our navy, in co-operation with that of England, extirpated the Riff piracies by bombarding the Moslem ports.  The vaunted civilizations of the North African states would have been supported by wholesale marauding to this day, had not their piratical fleets been thus summarily swept from the seas by other powers.