Noble as is his masterpiece of the Mosque of Omar, there is something about it of that patchwork pavilion.
It was based on Christian work, it was built with fragments, it was content with things that fastidious architects call fictions or even shams.
I frequently saw old ruined houses of which there only remained two walls of stone, to which the nomads had added two walls of canvas making an exact cube in form with the most startling incongruity in colour.
He needs the form and he does not mind the incongruity, nor does he mind the fact that somebody else has done the solid part and he has only done the ramshackle part.

You can say that he is nobly superior to jealousy, or that he is without artistic ambition, or that he is too much of a nomad to mind living half in somebody else's house and half in his own.

The real quality is probably too subtle for any simple praise or blame; we can only say that there is in the wandering Moslem a curious kind of limited common sense; which might even be called a short-sighted common sense.
But however we define it, that is what can really be traced through Arab conquests and Arab culture in all its ingenuity and insufficiency.
That is the note of these nomads in all the things in which they have succeeded and failed.

In that sense they are constructive and in that sense unconstructive; in that sense artistic and in that sense inartistic; in that sense practical and in that sense unpractical; in that sense cunning and in that sense innocent.

The curtains they would hang round Stonehenge might be of beautifully selected colours.
The banners they waved from Stonehenge might be defended with glorious courage and enthusiasm.