Each individual organism is a completely integrated whole or a complete Gestalt...

Each individual organism is a completely integrated whole or a complete Gestalt, but though such an integration is an ideal of each cul­ture it has never been fully achieved by any culture. Each culture is a super­system consisting of some large systems such as religion, language, law, philo­sophy, science, fine arts, ethics, economics, technology, politics, territorial sway, associations, customs, and mores.

Each of these consists of smaller systems as science includes physics, chemistry, biology, zoology, etc., and each of these smaller systems is comprised of yet smaller systems as mathematics is comprised of geometry, algebra, arithmetic, and so on. Besides these systems there are partly connected or wholly isolated heaps within these systems and super‑systems.

Thus, a total culture of any organized group consists not of one cultural system but of a multitude of vast and small cultural systems that are partly in harmony, partly out of harmony, with one another, and in addi­tion many congeries of various kinds. No past empire was as well‑knit as the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus and yet groups like the Kharijites and the Shiites fell apart from its total structure.

After the fall of the Umay­yads in the religious field there appeared some isolated groups like the Qarma­tians and the Isma'ilites, and in the political sphere Muslim Spain became not only independent of but also hostile to the `Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad under which Muslim culture and thought may be said to have reached their golden prime.

So much about the organismic side of the theory of Danilevsky, Spengler, and Toynbee when examined in the light of the history of Muslim culture and thought. What about its cyclical side? Is the life of a people like a meteor, beginning, rising, falling, and then disappearing for ever? Does the history of a society or a culture see only one spring, one summer, and one autumn and then, in its winter, completely close?

The philosophers of history men­tioned above, except Spengler, concede that the length of each period may be different with different peoples and cultures, but, according to them, the cycle is just one moving curve or one wave that rises and falls only once. This position also seems to be wrong.