f flowers.

Muhammad's biographers state that there were but two things for which he
really cared--women and perfume. His followers the Moors could not do more
than do better. Other inventions of theirs being inadequate, they joined
to them the art of preserving perfume by distillation and the art, higher
still, of perfuming life with love. Muhammad was unable to convert
humanity to a belief in the uniqueness of Allah, but the Moors, for a
while at least, converted Europe to a belief that love was unique.
Muhammad created a paradise of houris and musk. More subtly the Moors
created a heaven on earth. It had its defects as everything earthly must
have, but such were its delights that the courtesan had no place in its
parks. For the first time in history a nation appeared that renounced
Venus Pandemos. For the first time a nation appeared among whom woman was
neither punished nor bought.[51]

In the Koran it is written: "Man shall have pre-eminence over woman
because of the advantages wherein God hath caused one of them to excel
the other. The honest women are obedient, careful in the absence of their
husbands. But those whose perverseness ye shall be apprehensive of,
rebuke, remove into separate apartments and chastise."

The Moors were devout. They were also schismatic. They had separated from
Oriental Islam. Even in the privacy of the harem they would not have
struck a woman with a rose.

The harem was not a Muhammadan invention. It was a legacy from Solomon.
Originally the Muslim faith was a creed of sobriety that included a
deference to women theretofore unknown. Its subsequent corruption was due
to Assyria and the ferocious apostolicism of the Turk. The Islamic
seclusion of women came primarily from an excess of delicacy. It was
devised in order that their beauty might not excite desires in the hearts
of strangers and they be affronted by the ardor of covetous eyes. That
ardor the Moors deflected with a talisman composed of the magic word
Masch-Allah which, placed in filigree on the forehead of the beloved was
supposed to indicate--and perhaps did--that her heart was not her own. In
Baghdad where men are said to have been so inflammable that they fell in
love with a woman at the rumor of her beauty, at even the mere sight of
the impress of her hand, it was not entirely unnatural that they should
have secluded those for whom they cared. With finer jealousy the Moors
suggested to the women who cared for them the ad