Note 54 — Chapter VIII · FREETHOUGHT UNDER ISLAM1

It is to be noted that, while the heretics in time came under Greek and other foreign influences, their criticism of the Koran was at the outset their own.54 The Shîites, becoming broadly the party of the Persians, admitted in time Persian, Jewish, Gnostic, Manichæan, and other dualistic doctrines, and generally tended to interpret the Koran allegorically.55 A particular school of allegorists, the Bathenians, even tended to purify the idea of deity in an agnostic direction.56 All of these would appear to have ranked genetically as Motazilites; and the manifold play of heretical thought gradually forced a certain habit of reasoning on the orthodox,57 who as usual found their advantage in the dissidences of the dissenters. On the other hand, the Motazilites found new resources in the study and translation of Greek works, scientific and philosophical.58 They were thus the prime factors, on the Arab side, in the culture-evolution which went on under the earlier of the Abasside Khalifs (750–1258). Greek literature reached them mainly through the Syrian Christians, in whose hands it had been put by the Nestorians, driven out of their scientific school at Edessa and exiled by Leo the Isaurian (716–741);59 possibly also in part through the philosophers who, on being exiled from Athens by Justinian, settled for a time in Persia.60 The total result was that already in the ninth century, within two hundred years of the beginning of Mohammed’s preaching, the Saracens in Persia had reached not only a remarkable height of material civilization, their wealth exceeding that of Byzantium, but a considerable though quasi-secret measure of scientific knowledge and rational thought,61 including even some measure of pure atheism. All forms of rationalism alike were called zendēkism by the orthodox, the name having the epithetic force of the Christian terms “infidelity” and “atheism”.62