Magic and Religion in North Africa

civilization expands, it is perhaps not so much the difference in races and environments that hinders its development as the clash with differently constituted civilizations. This is what happened to Islam when it developed outside its country of origin.

As long as the Muslim religion remained within the limits of Arabia, Asia Minor, and North Africa, it dealt only with primitive or degenerate civilizations, with races not fundamentally different from Semitic races, and with climates and countries analogous to those that saw its birth. Even in Spain, it was not too disoriented, at least from this point of view, for we must not forget that Spain is perhaps the only great country that has been "de-Muslimized." But, in the end, Arabia and the shores of the Mediterranean nonetheless constitute the true domain of Islam, the one where it developed with the greatest continuity. Although Baghdad is near the Persian Gulf, the history of Mesopotamia is above all related to the history of the West, and one can, without too much exaggeration, argue that Muslim civilization is primarily a Mediterranean civilization.

But when Islam advanced toward the East, it encountered, on one hand, old civilizations elaborated by peoples of a character very different from that of the Muslims of the West, and on the other hand, rudimentary social organizations sketched out by tribes still in their infancy: the latter were not yet advanced enough to understand it, and the former had followed a different path. Thus, on one hand, Islam clashed in India with the ardent imagination of the Hindus, their pantheistic religion with its exuberant mythology, and their organization crystallized into a system of castes; and in China, it met the down-to-earth practical sense of the "Celestials" a common term for the Chinese at the time, their refined industries, their imprecise religion—which was not favorable to the development of dogmas—and their complicated political organization with its meticulous administration and its swarming bureaucracy. It therefore had to alter itself considerably to adapt to these new conditions.