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The result of these discords was a tripartite division of the Mohammedan Empire in the tenth century into the khalifates of Bagdad, of Cairoan, and of Cordova. Unity in Mohammedan political action was at an end, and Christendom found its safeguard, not in supernatural help, but in the quarrels of the rival potentates.
This was prevented not only by the schismatic kingdoms, khalifates, or imamates like Shi'itic Persia, which was consolidated just in the sixteenth century, by the unceasing opposition of the Imams of Yemen, and Kharijite principalities at the extremities of the Mohammedan world.
In little more than a single generation all the children of the north of Africa were speaking Arabic. During the khalifates of Abu-Bekr and Omar, and within twelve years after the death of Mohammed, the Arabians had reduced thirty-six thousand cities, towns, and castles in Persia, Syria, Africa, and had destroyed four thousand churches, replacing them with fourteen hundred mosques.
The Arabians, from their first cultivation of philosophy, had been infected by them; they were current in all the colleges of the three khalifates. Considered not as a mode of thought, that will spontaneously occur to all men at a certain stage of intellectual development, but as having originated with Aristotle, they continually found favor with men of the highest culture.