If people would
be as sincere as other people would like them to be, I think no one
would profess regret for the Arab civilization in the presence of its
monuments. Those Moors were of a religion which revolts all the finer
instincts and lifts the soul with no generous hopes; and the records of
it have no appeal save to the love of mere beautiful decoration. Even
here it mostly fails, to my thinking, and I say that for my part I found
nothing so grand in the great mosaue of Cordova as the cathedral which
rises in the heart of it. If Abderrahman boasted that he would rear a
shrine to the joy of earthly life and the hope of an earthly heaven, in
the place of the Christian temple which he would throw down, I should
like to overhear what his disembodied spirit would have to say to the
saint whose shrine he demolished. I think the saint would have the
better of him in any contention for their respective faiths, and could
easily convince the impartial witness that his religion then abiding in
medieval gloom was of promise for the future which Islam can never be.
Yet it cannot be denied that when Abderraham built his mosque the Arabs
of Cordova were a finer and wiser people than the Christians who dwelt
in intellectual darkness among them, with an ideal of gloom and
self-denial and a zeal for aimless martyrdom which must have been very
hard for a gentleman and scholar to bear.
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