Islam on the Crossroads

As to external attacks even that of the Mongols which was far more violent than anything the Roman Empire had ever experienced at the hands of the Huns or the Goths had not been able to shake the social organization and the unbroken political existence of the Empire of the Caliphs; though it undoubtedly contributed to the economic and intellectual stagntion of the later times. [...] The liberation of the European mind from the intellectual bondage to which the Christian Church had subjugated it fell in the time of the RenaissanceTHE TRAGEDY OF EUROPE and was due to a very large extent to the new cultural impulses which the Arabs were then tranmitting to the West. [...] At that point the cultural influence of the Islamic world—at first through the adventure of the Crusades in the East and the brilliant univesities of Muslim Spain in the West and later on through the growing commercial relations established by the republics of Genoa and Venice—began to hammer at the bolted doors of the European civilzation. [...] As the decades and the centuries advanced the spiritual hold of the Christian religious thought grew weaker and weaker and in the 18th century the predominance of the Church was definitely swept overboard by the French Revolution. [...] The enthusiasm of the Crusades had soon its sequels elsewhere in Europe : it encouraged the Christian nation of Spain to fight for the recovery of that country from the " yoke of the heathens." The breakdown of the Arab rule was not at once completed.