The Moslem factions of the Peninsula joined in precarious union under the sceptre of the Almoravides beheld with dismal forebodings the successive and crushing misfortunes which preceded the extinction of that dynasty. Neither religious accord nor political necessity would have reconciled them to the domination of a race between whose members and themselves there existed an irreconcilable antipathy. But on many points of theological controversy the liberal views of the most learned Moorish doctors shocked the strict disciplinarians of Islam. These accomplished polemical scholars had imbibed in the Universities of Seville and Cordova ideas highly offensive to the severely orthodox; they had indulged their wit at the expense of hypocrisy and ignorance in the intellectual atmosphere of the court, and the vengeance of those who were recently the objects of their satire had now descended with redoubled force upon the thoughtless aggressors. All books except the Koran and the Sunnah fell under the royal displeasure. The study of philosophy, although prohibited in the schools, was, as is usual under such circumstances, diligently pursued in secret. The intellectual habits of centuries were not to be abolished by an imperial edict, and the reprobation of a band of hypocrites and zealots who preached self-denial and abstemiousness, and were notoriously guilty of the grossest offences against morality, was unable to entirely suppress the accumulation and the diffusion of knowledge. No country in Europe, however, was more exclusively and disastrously controlled by ecclesiastical influence than was Moorish Spain under the rule of the Almoravides.