Contributions to the History of Islamic Civilization- Vol-1 (An Old and Rare Book)

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

I now offer to the public an English translation of Von Kremer's Culturgeschichtliche Streifzuge auf dem Gebiete des Islam. The monograph lying before us contains the rarest and choicest product of Von Kremer's historical studies. Sound, erudite, interesting and above all suggestive, it stands almost unique both as regards its fine scholarship and its wide comprehensiveness. The main theme of Von Kremer is the influence of Judaism and Christianity, Parseeism and Manicheism on Islam; but it is a work of genuine scholarship and not of rancorous controversy. It is, as we might expect, singularly free from parti pris, prejudice and passion. Von Kremer is the interpreter of history and not the advocate of a party. It is the pursuit of truth that has called into being the present as well as the other works of that great orientalist. Nor has he confined his attention to merely religious questions, but has also dis-cussed, with equal luminousness, the social problems which vexed the heart and entangled the feet of many generations of Muslims.

Nearly fifty years have rolled away since this mono-graph saw the light, but in spite of ceaseless activity in all branches of oriental learning it even now stands all but unrivalled.

The reader will find here not merely the history of the origin and growth of the Islamic sects, but will also see sketched before him the social life of the early as well as of the later Muslims. He will be able to follow, step by step, the changes which came over the sons of the desert; the gradual but appreciable departures from the old, stern and unbending habits and mode of life, the slow and silent transformation effected under the in-fluence of Persian and Byzantine luxury and license, the steady decline of the ideals of purity, equality, and fraternity of the early Muslims, the rise of a system of government which may be aptly described as a tax-hoarding monarchy, heedless of the welfare of its sub-jects, and riding roughshod over their feelings, and finally the beginning and the growth of the anti-Arab or the Shu'ubiyyah movement, which eventually succeeded in destroying the Arab rule and the Arab Government