In this abandonment of vulgar Mohammedanism, the example of the Jews greatly assisted.

They, too, had given up the anthropomorphism of their ancestors; they had exchanged the God who of old lived behind the veil of the temple for an infinite Intelligence pervading the universe, and, avowing their inability to conceive that any thing which had on a sudden been called into existence should be capable of immortality, they affirmed that the soul of man is connected with a past of which there was no beginning, and with a future to which there is no end.
In the intellectual history of Arabism the Jew and the Saracen are continually seen together.

It was the same in their political history, whether we consider it in Syria, in Egypt, or in Spain.

From them conjointly Western Europe derived its philosophical ideas, which in the course of time culminated in Averroism; Averroism is philosophical Islamism.

Europeans generally regarded Averroes as the author of these heresies, and the orthodox branded him accordingly, but he was nothing more than their collector and commentator.