with the destructive Ismaïlitism of the sect of the Assassins, whose founder, Hassan, had been the schoolfellow of Omar Khayyám. [1132] Of Sufiism as a whole it may be said that whether as inculcating quietism, or as widening the narrow theism of Islam into pantheism, or as sheltering an unaggressive rationalism, it has made for freedom and humanity in the Mohammedan world, lessening the evils of ignorance where it could not inspire progress. [1133] It long anticipated the semi-rationalism of those Christians who declare heaven and hell to be names for bodily or mental states in this life. [1134] On its more philosophic side too it connects with the long movement of speculation which, passing into European life through the Western Saracens, revived Greek philosophic thought in Christendom after the night of the Middle Ages, at the same time that Saracen science passed on the more precious seeds of real knowledge to the new civilization. § 5 There is the less need to deal at any length in these pages with the professed philosophy of the eastern Arabs, seeing that it was from first to last but little associated with any direct or practical repudiation of dogma and superstition. [1135] What freethought there was had only an unwritten currency, and is to be traced, as so often happens in later European history, through the protests of orthodox apologists. Thus the Persian Al Gazzali, in the preface to his work, The Destruction of the Philosophers, declares of the subjects of his attack that "the source of all their errors is the trust they have in the names of Sokrates, Hippokrates, Plato, and Aristotle; the admiration they profess for their genius and subtlety; and the belief, finally, that those great masters have been led by the profundity of their faculty to reject all religion, and to regard its precepts as the product of artifice and imposture." [1136] This implies an abundant rationalism, [1137] but, as always, the unwritten unbelief lost ground, its non-publication being the proof that orthodoxy prevailed against it. Movements which were originally liberal, such as that of the Motecallemîn, ran at length to mere dialectic defence of the faith against the philosophers. Fighting the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of matter, they sought to found a new theistic creationism on the atoms of Demokritos, making God the creator of the atoms, and negating the idea of natural law. [1138] Eastern Moslem philosophy in general followed some such line of reaction and petrifaction. The rationalistic Al Kindi (fl. 850) seems to have been led to philosophize by the Motazilite problems; but his successors mostly set them aside, developing an abstract logic and philosophy on Greek bases, or studying science for its own sake, though as a rule professing a devout acceptance of the Koran. [1139] Such was Avicenna (Ibn Sina: d. 1037), who taught that men should revere the faith in which they