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Soon after they became the disciples of Mahomet, their commercial and enterprizing spirit revived, if indeed it had ever languished; and it certainly displayed itself with augmented zeal, vigour, and success, under the influence of their new religion, and the genius and ambition of their caliphs.
Moreover we know "that the caliphs had forbidden under severe penalties the destruction" of Jewish and Christian books, a circumstance wholly inconsistent with this famous story. And finally, what a mediaeval recklessness of dates is shown in lugging into the story John the Grammarian, who was dead and in his grave when Alexandria was taken by Amrou!
Malcolm, during his travels in Persia, was praising Omar, the antagonist of Ali, as the greatest of the caliphs, a Persian, overcome by the justice of his observations, yet still adhering to his rooted prejudices, replied, "This is all very true, but he was a dog after all." Here Mohammedanism exists in a less rigorous form than in Turkey.
I hired a Moor who bore some title which indicated that he was a descendant of the Caliphs, and by which he had to be addressed to do chores and act as general assistant. One of the first things I did, the morning after my arrival, was to choose a convenient point on one of the stone parapets for "taking the sun," in order to test the running of my chronometer.
How wise we might grow, if we could only "the bird-language rightly spell"! In the olden times, we are told, the Caliphs and Viziers always listened to what the birds said about it, before they undertook any new enterprise. I have often thought I heard wise old folk discoursing, when a company of hens were busy on the side-hill, scratching and clucking together.
His death terminated the empire of the Caliphs of the West, which had been possessed by the dynasty of the Ommiades for the period of three centuries, A.D. 1027, Heg. 416. With the extinction of this line of princes vanished the power and the glory of Cordova.
When the cruel Abdalla had placed his nephew, Aboul-Abbas, on the throne of the Caliphs of Damascus, he formed the horrible design of exterminating the Ommiades. These princes were very numerous.
What indignation then was kindled by the pathetic narrative of the insults and blows which they had endured from the infidels who profaned the holy places with their hateful domination! In the ninth century, under caliphs of the temper of Haroun Al-Raschid, Christians had been well treated. About the middle of the tenth century the Fatimite caliphs of Egypt were the rulers at Jerusalem.
The revolt of the Arabs, which overthrew the power of the Persians in their western provinces and for a time restored Egypt to Constantinople, was the foundation of the mighty empire of the caliphs; and the Hegira, or flight of Muhammed, from which the Arabic historians count their lunar years, took place in 622, the twelfth year of Heraclius.
Even the city of Constantinople, “the Dome of Islám,” apostrophized in such condemnatory terms by Bahá’u’lláh, which, after the fall of Byzantium, had been hailed by the great Constantine as “the New Rome,” and exalted to the rank of the metropolis of both the Roman Empire and of Christendom, and subsequently revered as the seat of the Caliphs, was relegated to the position of a provincial city and stripped of all its pomp and glory, its soaring and slender minarets standing sentinel at the grave of so much vanished splendor and power.
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