Gentlemen and scholars were
what the Arabs of the Western Caliphate seem to have become, with a
primacy in medicine and mathematics beyond the learning of all other
Europe in their day. They were tolerant skeptics in matters of religion;
polite agnostics, who disliked extremely the passion of some Christians
dwelling among them for getting themselves put to death, as they did,
for insulting the popularly accepted Mohammedan creed. Probably people
of culture in Cordova were quite of Abderrahman's mind in wishing to
substitute the temple of a cheerfuler ideal for the shrine of the
medieval Christianity which he destroyed; though they might have had
their reserves as to the taste in which his mosque was completed. If
they recognized it as a concession to the general preference, they could
do so without the discomfort which they must have suffered when some new
horde of Berbers, full of faith and fight, came over from Africa to push
back the encroaching Spanish frontier, and give the local Christians as
much martyrdom as they wanted.
It is all a conjecture based upon material witness no more substantial
than that which the Latin domination left long centuries before the
Arabs came to possess the land.
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