Note 33 — Chapter V · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIANS OF SPAIN.

The very term Muzarabes (i.e. mustʻaribīn or Arabicised) applied to the Spanish Christians living under Arab rule, is significant of the tendencies that were at work. The study of Arabic very rapidly began to displace that of Latin throughout the country,33 so that the language of Christian theology came gradually to be neglected and forgotten. Even some of the higher clergy rendered themselves ridiculous by their ignorance of correct Latinity.34 It could hardly be expected that the laity would exhibit more zeal in such a matter than the clergy, and in 854 a Spanish writer brings the following complaint against his Christian fellow-countrymen:—“While we are investigating their (i.e. the Muslim) sacred ordinances and meeting together to study the sects of their philosophers—or rather philobraggers—not for the purpose of refuting their errors, but for the exquisite charm and for the eloquence and beauty of their language—neglecting the reading of the Scriptures, we are but setting up as an idol the number of the beast. (Apoc. xiii. 18.) Where nowadays can we find any learned layman who, absorbed in the study of the Holy Scriptures, cares to look at the works of any of the Latin Fathers? Who is there with any zeal for the writings of the Evangelists, or the Prophets, or Apostles? Our Christian young men, with their elegant airs and fluent speech, are showy in their dress and carriage, and are famed for the learning of the gentiles; intoxicated with Arab eloquence they greedily handle, eagerly devour and zealously discuss the books of the Chaldeans (i.e. Muhammadans), and make them known by praising them with every flourish of rhetoric, knowing nothing of the beauty of the Church’s literature, and looking down with contempt on the streams of the Church that flow forth from Paradise; alas! the Christians are so ignorant of their own law, the Latins pay so little attention to their own language, that in the whole Christian flock there is hardly one man in a thousand who can write a letter to inquire after a friend’s health intelligibly, while you may find a countless rabble of all kinds of them who can learnedly roll out the grandiloquent periods of the Chaldean tongue. They can even make poems, every line ending with the same letter, which display high flights of beauty and more skill in handling metre than the gentiles themselves possess.”35