Naturally, the struggle between the fundamentally opposed tendencies of traditionalism and rationalism was long and bitter. Yet the ultimate outcome was almost a foregone conclusion. Everything conspired to favour the triumph of dogma over reason. The whole historic tradition of the East (a tradition largely induced by racial and climatic factors[3]) was toward absolutism. This tradition had been interrupted by the inrush of the wild libertarianism of the desert. But the older tendency presently reasserted itself, stimulated as it was by the political transformation of the caliphate from theocratic, democracy to despotism. This triumph of absolutism in the field of government in fact assured its eventual triumph in all other fields as well. For, in the long run, despotism can no more tolerate liberty of thought than it can liberty of action. Some of the Damascus caliphs, to be sure, toyed with Motazelism, the Ommeyyads being mainly secular-minded men to whom freethinking was intellectually attractive. But presently the caliphs became aware of liberalism's political implications. The Motazelites did not confine themselves to the realm of pure philosophic speculation. They also trespassed on more dangerous ground. Motazelite voices were heard recalling the democratic days of the Meccan caliphate, when the Commander of the Faithful, instead of being an hereditary monarch, was elected by the people and responsible to public opinion. Some bold spirits even entered into relations with the fierce fanatic sects of inner Arabia, like the Kharijites, who, upholding the old desert freedom, refused to recognize the caliphate and proclaimed theories of advanced republicanism. The upshot was that the caliphs turned more and more toward the conservative theologians as against the liberals, just as they favoured the monarchist Neo-Arabs in preference to the intractable pure-blooded Arabs of the desert. Under the Abbasides the government came out frankly for religious absolutism. Standards of dogmatic orthodoxy were established, Motazelites were persecuted and put to death, and by the twelfth century A.D. the last vestiges of Saracenic liberalism were extirpated. The canons of Moslem thought were fixed. All creative activity ceased. The very memory of the great Motazelite doctors faded away. The Moslem mind was closed, not to be re-opened until our own day.