CHAPTER IV.

A MOHAMMEDAN REFORMATION.

IT is with considerable doubt of my ability to do justice to so very difficult a subject that I now approach the most important point of all in this inquiry, namely, the question on which in reality every other depends: Is there a possibility of ✓ anything like general reform for Islam in her political and moral life?">

It is obvious that, unless we can answer this in the affirmative, none of the changes I have been prefiguring will very much affect her ultimate fortunes neither the solution of her legal deadlock with the Ottoman Caliphate, nor the transfer of her metropolis to a new centre, nor even the triumph of her arms, if such were possible, in Africa or India. These by themselves could, at best, only delay her decline. They might even precipitate her ruin. Islam, if she relies only on the sword, must in the end perish by it, for her

forces, vast as they are, arc without physical cohesion, being scattered widely over the surface of three continents and divided by insuperable accidents of seas and deserts; and the enemy she would have to face is intelligent as well as strong, and would not let her rest. Already what is called the "Progress of the World" envelopes her with its ships and its commerce, and, above all, with its printed thought, which she is beginning to read. Nor is it likely in the future to affect her less. Every year as it goes by carries her farther from the possibility of isolation, and forces on her new acquaintances, not only her old foes, the Frank and Muscovite, but the German, the Chinaman, and the American, with all of whom she may have in turn to count. If she would not be strangled by these influences she must use other arms than those of the flesh, and meet the intellectual invasion of her frontiers with a corresponding intelligence. Otherwise she has nothing to look forward to but a gradual decay, spiritual as well as political. Her law must become little by little a dead letter, her Caliphate an obsolete survival, and her creed a mere opinion. Islam as a living and controlling moral force in the world would then gradually se.>

cease.

In expressing my conviction that Islam is not thus destined yet awhile to perish I believe that I am running counter to much high authority among my countrymen. I know that it is a received opinion with those best qualified to instruct the public that Islam is in its constitution unamenable to change, and by consequence to progressive life, or even, in the face of hostile elements, to prolonged life at all. Students of the Sheriat have not inaptly compared the Koranic law to a dead man's hand, rigid and cold, and only to be loosened when the hand itself shall have been cut away. It has been asserted that the first rule of Mohammedan thought has been that change was inadmissible, and development of religious practice, either to right or left of the narrow path of medieval scholasticism, absolutely precluded. I know this, and I know, too, that a vast array of learned Mohammedan opinion can be cited to prove this to be the case, and that very few of the modern Ulema of any school of divinity would venture openly to impugn its truth. Nor have I forgotten the repeated failure of attempts made in Turkey within the last fifty years to gain religious assent to the various legal innovations decreed by Sultan after Sultan in deference to

the will of Europe, nor the fate which has sometimes overtaken those who were the advocates of change. I know, according to all rule written and spoken by the orthodox, that Islam cannot move, and yet in spite of it I answer with some confidence in the fashion of Galileo, "E pur si muove."

The fact is, Islam does move. A vast change has come upon Mohammedan thought since its last legal Mujtahed wrote his last legal opinion; and what was true of orthodox Islam fifty and even twenty years ago is no longer true now. When Urquhart, the first exponent of Mohammedanism to Englishmen, began his writing, the Hanefite teaching of Constantinople had not begun to be questioned, and he was perfectly justified in citing it as the only rule recognized by the mass of the orthodox. No such thing as a liberal religious party then existed anywhere, and those who broke the law in the name of political reform were breakers of the law and nothing more Every good man was their enemy, and if any spoke of liberty he was understood as meaning licence. It was not even conceived then that the Sheriat might be legally remodelled. Now, however, and especially within the last ten years, a large section of godly and legal-minded men have ranged them

selves on the side of liberal opinion, and serious attempts have been made to reconcile a desire of improvement with unabated loyalty to Islam.

A true liberal party has thus been formed, which includes in its ranks not merely political intriguers of the type familiar to Europe in Midhat Pasha, but men of sincere piety, who would introduce moral as well as political reforms into the practice of Mohammedans. These have it in their programme to make the practice of religion more austere while widening its basis, to free the intelligence of believers from scholastic trammels, and at the same time to enforce more strictly the higher moral law of the Koran, which has been so long and so strangely violated. In this they stand in close resemblance to the "Reformers" of Christianity; and some of the circumstances which have given them birth are so analogous to those which Europe encountered in the fifteenth century that it is impossible not to draw in one's own mind a parallel, leading to the conviction that Islam, too, will work out for itself a Reformation

(The

The two chief agents of religious reform in Europe were the misery of the poor and the general spread of knowledge. It is difficult at this distance of time to conceive how abject was