RESOURCESissues concerning Christian Spain than for Muslim Spain. Conse-
quently, the validity of his comparative conclusions suffers from the
use of secondary sources for his material on Islamic Spain.
Nevertheless, no treatment of the Islamic east or of the former
question of cultural legacies in early Islamic civilization compares to
that of Glick. A. von Kremer's Culturgeschichte des Orients unter den
Chalifen (Vienna, vol. I, 1875; vol. n, 1877; Eng. tr. S. Khuda Buksh,
The Orient under the Caliphs, Calcutta, 1920) is the fountainhead for
the modern discussion of such matters. Although it has been considered
premature, it has cast a long shadow. For most modern scholars, von
Kremer is the source of the theory that the 'Abbasis were responsible
for an Iranian cultural revival. The arguments of C. Becker in favor
of Hellenistic influences in the formation of Islamic civilization may
be found in the articles collected in the first volume of his Islamstudien
(Leipzig, 1924-32). The view of Islamic civilization as an Hellenistic
cultural revival was also elaborated by A. Mez in Die Renaissance des
Islams (Heidelberg, 1922; Eng. tr. S. Khuda Buksh, The Renaissance
of Islam, London, 1937, repr. 1968). But R. Levy's "Persia and the
Arabs," in The Legacy of Persia, ed. A. J. Arberry (Oxford, 1963) is
simplistic and disappointing, being little more than a summary of the
ideas of others. The survival of pagan traditions in Islamic culture was
discussed in terms of the mythic background of certain Qur'anic figures
(such as Dhii I-Qarnayn), Muslim appropriation of ancient gods and
heroes, and their survival in local cults and in place names in C. E.
Dubler's sixteen-page published lecture, Das Weiterleben des altern
Orients in Islam (Zurich, 1958). His article, "Survivances de l'ancien
Orient dans l'Islam (Considerations generales)," SI 7 (1957): 47-75,
is more substantial and has a bibliography. J. Kraemer's Das Problem
der islamischen Kulturgeschichte (Tubingen, 1959) treats the transi-
tion from pre-Islamic to Islamic culture and balances the "Hellenic"
nature of that culture against other elements. More recently, and from
the point of view of survivals from late antiquity is the disparate
collection of articles assembled by R. Stiehl, ed., in Festschrift Franz
Altheim, Beitrage zur alten Geschichte und deren Nachleben (Berlin,
1970). The realization that the culture of the western part of the
Sasanian empire was not solely Iranian is reflected in the contributions
of Widengren, Brock, Drijvers, and others to a symposium held at
Gottingen in 1971 and published by A. Dietrich, ed., as Synkretismus
im syrisch-persischen Kulturgebiet (Gottingen, 1975).
In one way or another, these works help to identify the main in-