But in Damascus, and still more in Bagdad, things were different. There the pure-blooded Arabs were only a handful among swarms of Syrian and Persian converts and "Neo-Arab" mixed-bloods. These people were filled with traditions of despotism and were quite ready to yield the caliphs obsequious obedience. The caliphs, in their turn, leaned more and more upon these complaisant subjects, drawing from their ranks courtiers, officials, and ultimately soldiers. Shocked and angered, the proud Arabs gradually returned to the desert, while the government fell into the well-worn ruts of traditional Oriental despotism. When the caliphate was moved to Bagdad after the founding of the Abbaside dynasty (A.D. 750), Persian influence became preponderant. The famous Caliph Haroun-al-Rashid, the hero of the _Arabian Nights_, was a typical Persian monarch, a true successor of Xerxes and Chosroes, and as different from Abu Bekr or Omar as it is possible to conceive. And, in Bagdad, as elsewhere, despotic power was fatal to its possessors. Under its blight the "successors" of Mohammed became capricious tyrants or degenerate harem puppets, whose nerveless hands were wholly incapable of guiding the great Moslem Empire.
The empire, in fact, gradually went to pieces. Shaken by the civil wars, bereft of strong leaders, and deprived of the invigorating amalgam of the unspoiled desert Arabs, political unity could not endure. Everywhere there occurred revivals of suppressed racial or particularist tendencies. The very rapidity of Islam's expansion turned against it, now that the well-springs of that expansion were dried up. Islam had made millions of converts, of many sects and races, but it had digested them very imperfectly. Mohammed had really converted the Arabs, because he merely voiced ideas which were obscurely germinating in Arab minds and appealed to impulses innate in the Arab blood. When, however, Islam was accepted by non-Arab peoples, they instinctively interpreted the Prophet's message according to their particular racial tendencies and cultural backgrounds, the result being that primitive Islam was distorted or perverted. The most extreme example of this was in Persia, where the austere monotheism of Mohammed was transmuted into the elaborate mystical cult known as Shiism, which presently cut the Persians off from full communion with the orthodox Moslem world. The same transmutive tendency appears, in lesser degree, in the saint-worship of the North African Berbers and in the pantheism of the Hindu Moslems--both developments which Mohammed would have unquestionably execrated.