Carra de Vaux, _Gazali_, 129-142, and _Encyclopaedia of Islam_ 4,
244-246.]

Let us examine three points regarding the influence on Moslem morals and
general conduct. In the first place stand the moral writings of
ecclesiastical character. The morality is rooted in and based on the
moral of the Bible and then on the developed Moslem law and has absorbed
in itself some of the elements of the ethics of Christianity. In the
second place, there is a series of ethical documents of a most valued
nature in the shape of proverbs, dicta, maxims, fables, constituting a
kind of moral philosophy, often independent of each other, varied in
their character, and different as to time and the place of their
compositions. Here we may separate a certain stratum of Persian element,
and an analysis of them may reveal partly contemporary knowledge and
partly elements of foreign religious ethics. The third but not the last
place in importance is occupied by the Greek ethical tradition in which
latterly are discernible important Christian constituents. Recent
studies have yielded us as their result, this structure of Musalman
ethics. But it is to be noted that the theoretical deductions at first
sight do not find confirmation in facts. For we do not know which Greek
books on ethics were translated in the beginning of the period of the
scientific development of Islam, and for the support of our thesis we
have to point to the possibility of oral transmission of Hellenic
ethical tradition through Syriac scholars, although this circumstance
does not militate against our hypothesis. Besides a small amount of
translations from Greek ethical works, especially the books of
Aristotle, there are observed among the works embodied in this tradition
a series of pseudographs which, however, can have only an external
relation with the Greek sciences and which would rather lead to the
second group of the influences on Musalman ethical monuments namely, the