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Title: The Future of Islam

Author: Wilfred Scawen Blunt

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[Pg i]

THE FUTURE OF ISLAM

BY

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

Published by permission of the Proprietors of the "Fortnightly Review"

LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., 1, PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1882

CONTENTS

[Pg v]

PREFACE.

These essays, written for the Fortnightly Review in the summer and autumn of 1881, were intended as first sketches only of a maturer work which the author hoped, before giving finally to the public, to complete at leisure, and develop in a form worthy of critical acceptance, and of the great subject he had chosen. Events, however, have marched faster than he at all anticipated, and it has become a matter of importance with him that the idea they were designed to illustrate should be given immediate and full publicity. The French, by their invasion of Tunis, have precipitated the Mohammedan movement in North Africa; Egypt has roused herself for a great effort of national and religious reform; and on all sides Islam is seen to be convulsed by political portents of ever-growing [Pg vi]intensity. He believes that his countrymen will in a very few months have to make their final choice in India, whether they will lead or be led by the wave of religious energy which is sweeping eastwards, and he conceives it of consequence that at least they should know the main issues of the problem before them. To shut their eyes to the great facts of contemporary history, because that history has no immediate connection with their daily life, is a course unworthy of a great nation; and in England, where the opinion of the people guides the conduct of affairs, can hardly fail to bring disaster. It should be remembered that the modern British Empire, an agglomeration of races ruled by public opinion in a remote island, is an experiment new in the history of the world, and needs justification in exceptional enlightenment; and it must be remembered, too, that no empire ever yet was governed without a living policy. The author, therefore, has resolved to publish his work, crude as it is, without more delay, in the hope that it may be instrumental in guiding the national choice. He is, nevertheless, fully aware of its [Pg vii]defects both in accuracy and completeness, and he can only hope that they may be pardoned him in view of the general truth of the picture he has drawn.

Since the last of these essays was written, their author has returned to Egypt, and has there had the satisfaction of finding the ideas, vaguely foreshadowed by him as the dream of some few liberal Ulema of the Azhar, already a practical reality. Cairo has now declared itself as the home of progressive thought in Islam, and its university as the once more independent seat of Arabian theology. Secured from Turkish interference by the national movement of the Arabs, the Ulema of the Azhar have joined heart and soul with the party of reform. The importance of this event can hardly be overrated; and if, as now seems probable, a liberal Mohammedan Government by a free Mohammedan people should establish itself firmly on the Nile, it is beyond question that the basis of a social and political Reformation for all Islam has been laid. It is more than all a hopeful sign that extreme moderation with regard to the Caliphate [Pg viii]is observed by the Egyptian leaders. Independence, not opposition, is the motto of the party; and no rent has been made or is contemplated by them in the orthodox coat of Islam. Abd el Hamid Khan is still recognized as the actual Emir el Mumenin, and the restoration of a more legitimate Caliphate is deferred for the day when its fate shall have overtaken the Ottoman Empire. This is as it should be. Schism would only weaken the cause of religion, already threatened by a thousand enemies; and the premature appearance of an Anti-Caliph in Egypt or Arabia, however legitimate a candidate he might be by birth for the office, would divide the Mohammedan world into two hostile camps, and so bring scandal and injury on the general cause. In the meantime, however, liberal thought will have a fair field for its development, and can hardly fail to extend its influence wherever the Arabic language is spoken, and among all those races which look on the Azhar as the centre of their intellectual life. This is a notable achievement, and one which patience may turn, perhaps in a very few years, to a more [Pg ix]general triumph. There can be little doubt now that the death of Abd el Hamid, or his fall from Empire, will be the signal for the return of the Caliphate to Cairo, and a formal renewal there by the Arabian mind of its lost religious leadership.

To Mohammedans the author owes more than a word of apology. A stranger and a sojourner among them, he has ventured on an exposition of their domestic griefs, and has occasionally touched the ark of their religion with what will seem to them a profane hand; but his motive has been throughout a pure one, and he trusts that they will pardon him in virtue of the sympathy with them which must be apparent in every line that he has written. He has predicted for them great political misfortunes in the immediate future, because he believes that these are a necessary step in the process of their spiritual development; but he has a supreme confidence in Islam, not only as a spiritual, but as a temporal system the heritage and gift of the Arabian race, and capable of satisfying their most civilized wants; and he believes in the hour of their political resurgence. In the mean[Pg x]time he is convinced that he serves their interests best by speaking what he holds to be the truth regarding their situation. Their day of empire has all but passed away, but there remains to them a day of social independence better than empire. Enlightened, reformed and united in sympathy, Mussulmans need not fear political destruction in their original homes, Arabia, Egypt, and North Africa; and these must suffice them as a Dar el Islam till better days shall come. If the author can do anything to help them to preserve that independence they may count upon him freely within the limits of his strength, and he trusts to prove to them yet his sincerity in some worthier way than by the publication of these first essays.

Cairo, January 15th, 1882.

[Pg 1]

THE FUTURE OF ISLAM.

CHAPTER I.

CENSUS OF THE MOHAMMEDAN WORLD.

THE HAJ.

In the lull, which we hope is soon to break the storm of party strife in England, it may not perhaps be impossible to direct public attention to the rapid growth of questions which for the last few years have been agitating the religious mind of Asia, and which are certain before long to present themselves as a very serious perplexity to British statesmen; questions, moreover, which if not dealt with by them betimes, it will later be found out of their power to deal with at all, though a vigorous policy at the present moment might yet solve them to this country's very great advantage.

The revival which is taking place in the Moham[Pg 2]medan world is indeed worthy of every Englishman's attention, and it is difficult to believe that it has not received anxious consideration at the hands of those whose official responsibility lies chiefly in the direction of Asia; but I am not aware that it has hitherto been placed in its true light before the English public, or that a quite definite policy regarding it may be counted on as existing in the counsels of the present Cabinet. Indeed, as regards the Cabinet, the reverse may very well be the case. We know how suspicious English politicians are of policies which may be denounced by their enemies as speculative; and it is quite possible that the very magnitude of the problem to be solved in considering the future of Islam may have caused it to be put aside there as one "outside the sphere of practical politics." The phrase is a convenient one, and is much used by those in power amongst us who would evade the labour or the responsibility of great decisions. Yet that such a problem exists in a new and very serious form I do not hesitate to affirm, nor will my proposition, as I think, be doubted by any who have mingled much in the last few years with the Mussulman populations of Western Asia. There it is easily discernible that great changes [Pg 3]are impending, changes perhaps analogous to those which Christendom underwent four hundred years ago, and that a new departure is urgently demanded of England if she would maintain even for a few years her position as the guide and arbiter of Asiatic progress.

It was not altogether without the design of gaining more accurate knowledge than I could find elsewhere on the subject of this Mohammedan revival that I visited Jeddah in the early part of the past winter, and that I subsequently spent some months in Egypt and Syria in the almost exclusive society of Mussulmans. Jeddah, I argued, the seaport of Mecca and only forty miles distant from that famous centre of the Moslem universe, would be the most convenient spot from which I could obtain such a bird's-eye view of Islam as I was in search of; and I imagined rightly that I should there find myself in an atmosphere less provincial than that of Cairo, or Bagdad, or Constantinople.

Jeddah is indeed in the pilgrim season the suburb of a great metropolis, and even a European stranger there feels that he is no longer in a world of little thoughts and local aspirations. On every side the politics he hears discussed are those of the [Pg 4]great world, and the religion professed is that of a wider Islam than he has been accustomed to in Turkey or in India. There every race and language are represented, and every sect. Indians, Persians, Moors, are there,—negroes from the Niger, Malays from Java, Tartars from the Khanates, Arabs from the French Sahara, from Oman and Zanzibar, even, in Chinese dress and undistinguishable from other natives of the Celestial Empire, Mussulmans from the interior of China. As one meets these walking in the streets, one's view of Islam becomes suddenly enlarged, and one finds oneself exclaiming with Sir Thomas Browne, "Truly the (Mussulman) world is greater than that part of it geographers have described." The permanent population, too, of Jeddah is a microcosm of Islam. It is made up of individuals from every nation under heaven. Besides the indigenous Arab, who has given his language and his tone of thought to the rest, there is a mixed resident multitude descended from the countless pilgrims who have remained to live and die in the holy cities. These preserve, to a certain extent, their individuality, at least for a generation or two, and maintain a connection with the lands to which they owe their origin and the people who were their [Pg 5]countrymen. Thus there is constantly found at Jeddah a free mart of intelligence for all that is happening in the world; and the common gossip of the bazaar retails news from every corner of the Mussulman earth. It is hardly too much to say that one can learn more of modern Islam in a week at Jeddah than in a year elsewhere, for there the very shopkeepers discourse of things divine, and even the Frank Vice-Consuls prophesy. The Hejazi is less shy, too, of discussing religious matters than his fellow Mussulmans are in other places. Religion is, as it were, part of his stock-in-trade, and he is accustomed to parade it before strangers. With a European he may do this a little disdainfully, but still he will do it, and with less disguise or desire to please than is in most places the case. Moreover—and this is important—it is almost always the practical side of questions that the commercial Jeddan will put forward. He sees things from a political and economical point of view, rather than a doctrinal, and if fanatical, he is so from the same motives, and no others, which once moved the citizens of Ephesus to defend the worship of their shrines.

In other cities, Cairo and Constantinople excepted, the Ulema, or learned men, of whom a [Pg 6]stranger might seek instruction, would be found busying themselves mainly with doctrinal matters not always interesting at the present day, old-world arguments of Koranic interpretation which have from time immemorial occupied the schools. But here even these are treated practically, and as they bear on the political aspect of the hour. For myself, I became speedily impressed with the advantage thus afforded me, and neglected no opportunity which offered itself for listening and asking questions, so that without pretending to the possession of more special skill than any intelligent inquirer might command, I obtained a mass of information I cannot but think to be of great value—while this in its turn served me later as an introduction to such Mussulman divines as I afterwards met in the North. Jeddah then realized all my hopes and gratified nearly all my curiosities. I will own, too, to having come away with more than a gratified curiosity, and to having found new worlds of thought and life in an atmosphere I had fancied to be only of decay. I was astonished at the vigorous life of Islam, at its practical hopes and fears in this modern nineteenth century, and above all at its reality as a moral force; so that if I had not exactly come to scoff, I certainly re[Pg 7]mained, in a certain sense, to pray. At least I left it interested, as I had never thought to be, in the great struggle which seemed to me impending between the parties of reaction in Islam and reform, and not a little hopeful as to its favourable issue. What this is likely to be I now intend to discuss.

First, however, it will I think be as well to survey briefly the actual composition of the Mohammedan world. It is only by a knowledge of the elements of which Islam is made up that we can guess its future, and these are less generally known than they should be. A stranger from Europe visiting the Hejaz is, as I have said, irresistibly struck with the vastness of the religious world in whose centre he stands. Mohammedanism to our Western eyes seems almost bounded by the limits of the Ottoman Empire. The Turk stands in our foreground, and has stood there from the days of Bajazet, and in our vulgar tongue his name is still synonymous with Moslem, so that we are apt to look upon him as, if not the only, at least the chief figure of Islam. But from Arabia we see things in a truer perspective, and become aware that beyond and without the Ottoman dominions there are races and nations, no less truly followers of the Prophet, beside whom the [Pg 8]Turk shrinks into numerical insignificance. We catch sight, it may be for the first time in their real proportions, of the old Persian and Mogul monarchies, of the forty million Mussulmans of India, of the thirty million Malays, of the fifteen million Chinese, and the vast and yet uncounted Mohammedan populations of Central Africa. We see, too, how important is still the Arabian element, and how necessary it is to count with it, in any estimate we may form of Islam's possible future. Turkey, meanwhile, and Constantinople, retire to a rather remote horizon, and the Mussulman centre of gravity is as it were shifted from the north and west towards the south and east.

I was at some pains while at Jeddah to gain accurate statistics of the Haj according to the various races and sects composing it, and with them of the populations they in some measure represent. The pilgrimage is of course no certain guide as to the composition of the Mussulman world, for many accidents of distance and political circumstance interfere with calculations based on it. Still to a certain extent a proportion is preserved between it and the populations which supply it; and in default of better, statistics of the Haj afford us an index not without value of [Pg 9]the degree of religious vitality existing in the various Mussulman countries. My figures, which for convenience I have arranged in tabular form, are taken principally from an official record, kept for some years past at Jeddah, of the pilgrims landed at that port, and checked as far as European subjects are concerned by reference to the consular agents residing there. They may therefore be relied upon as fairly accurate; while for the land pilgrimage I trust in part my own observations, made three years ago, in part statistics obtained at Cairo and Damascus. For the table of population in the various lands of Islam I am obliged to go more directly to European sources of information. As may be supposed, no statistics on this point of any value were obtainable at Jeddah; but by taking the figures commonly given in our handbooks, and supplementing and correcting these by reference to such persons as I could find who knew the countries, I have, I hope, arrived at an approximation to the truth, near enough to give a tolerable idea to general readers of the numerical proportions of Islam. Strict accuracy, however, I do not here pretend to, nor would it if obtainable materially help my present argument.

[Pg 10]The following is my table:—

Table of the Mecca Pilgrimage of 1880.

[Pg 11]The figures thus roundly given require explanation in order to be of their full value as a bird's-eye view of Islam. I will take them as nearly as possible in the order in which they stand, grouping them, however, for further convenience sake under their various sectarian heads, for it must be remembered that Islam, which in its institution was intended to be one community, political and religious, is now divided not only into many nations, but into many sects. All, however, hold certain fundamental beliefs, and all perform the pilgrimage to Mecca, where they meet on common ground, and it is to this latter fact that the importance attached to the Haj is mainly owing.

The main beliefs common to all Mussulmans are—

1. A belief in one true God, the creator and ordainer of all things.

2. A belief in a future life of reward or punishment.

3. A belief in a divine revelation imparted first to Adam and renewed at intervals to Noah, to Abraham, to Moses, and to Jesus Christ, and last of all in its perfect form to Mohammed. This revelation is not only one of dogma, but of practice. [Pg 12]It claims to have taught an universal rule of life for all mankind in politics and legislation as well as in doctrine and in morals. This is called Islam.

4. A belief in the Koran as the literal word of God, and of its inspired interpretation by the Prophet and his companions, preserved through tradition (Hadith).[1]

These summed up in the well-known "Kelemat" or act of faith, "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the apostle of God," form a common doctrinal basis for every sect of Islam—and also common to all are the four religious acts, prayer, fasting, almsgiving and pilgrimage, ordained by the Koran itself. On other points, however, both of belief and practice, they differ widely; so widely that the sects must be considered as not only distinct from, but hostile to, each other. They are nevertheless, it must be admitted, less absolutely irreconcileable than are the corresponding sects of Christianity, for all allow the rest to be distinctly [Pg 13]within the pale of Islam, and they pray on occasion in each other's mosques and kneel at the same shrines on pilgrimage. Neither do they condemn each other's errors as altogether damnable—except, I believe, in the case of the Wahhabites, who accuse other Moslems of polytheism and idolatry. The census of the four great sects may be thus roughly given—

The Sunites, or People of the Path, are of course by far the most important of these. They stand in that relation to the other sects in which the Catholic Church stands to the various Christian heresies, and claim alone to represent that continuous body of tradition political and religious, which is the sign of a living church. In addition to the dogmas already mentioned, they hold that, after the Prophet and his companions, other authorised channels of tradition exist of hardly less authority with these. The sayings of the four first Caliphs, as collected in the first century of the Mohammedan era, they hold to be inspired and unimpeachable, as are to a certain extent the [Pg 14]theological treatises of the four great doctors of Islam, the Imams Abu Hanifeh, Malek, Esh Shafy, and Hanbal, and after them, though with less and less authority, the "fetwas," or decisions of distinguished Ulema, down to the present day. The collected body of teaching acquired from these sources is called the Sheriat (in Turkey the Sheriati Sherifeh) and is the canon law of Islam. Nor is it lawful that this should be gainsaid; while the Imams themselves may not inaptly be compared to the fathers of our Christian Church. It is a dogma, too, with the Sunites that they are not only an ecclesiastical but a political body, and that among them is the living representative of the temporal power of the Prophet, in the person of his Khalifeh or successor, though there is much division of opinion as to the precise line of succession in the past and the legitimate ownership of the title in the present. But this is too intricate and important a matter to be entered on at present.

The Sunites are then the body of authority and tradition, and being more numerous than the other three sects put together in a proportion of four and a half to one, have a good right to treat these as heretics. It must not, however, be supposed that even the Sunites profess absolutely [Pg 15]homogeneous opinions. The path of Orthodox Islam is no macadamised road such as the Catholic Church of Christendom has become, but like one of its own Haj routes goes winding on, a labyrinth of separate tracks, some near, some far apart, some clean out of sight of the rest. All lead, it is true, in the same main direction, and here and there in difficult ground where there is a mountain range to cross or where some defile narrows they are brought together, but otherwise they follow their own ways as the idiosyncrasy of race and disposition may dictate. There is no common authority in the world acknowledged as superior to the rest, neither is there any office corresponding even remotely with the infallible Papacy.

The Mohammedan nations have for the most part each its separate school, composed of its own Ulema and presided over by its own Grand Mufti or Sheykh el Islam, and these are independent of all external influence. If they meet at all it is at Mecca, but even at Mecca there is no college of cardinals, no central authority; and though occasionally cases are referred thither or to Constantinople or Cairo, the fetwas given are not of absolute binding power over the faithful in other lands. Moreover, besides these national distinctions, there [Pg 16]are three recognized schools of theology which divide between them the allegiance of the orthodox, and which, while not in theory opposed, do in fact represent as many distinct lines of religious thought. These it has been the fashion with European writers to describe as sects, but the name sect is certainly inaccurate, for the distinctions recognisable in their respective teachings are not more clearly marked than in those of our own Church parties, the high, the low, and the broad. Indeed a rather striking analogy may be traced between these three phases of English church teaching and the three so-called "orthodox sects" of Islam. The three Mohammedan schools are the Hanefite, the Malekite, and the Shafite, while a fourth, the Hanbalite, is usually added, but it numbers at the present day so few followers that we need not notice it.[2] A few words will describe each of these.

The Hanefite school of theology may be described as the school of the upper classes. It is the high and dry party of Church and State, if such expressions can be used about Islam. To it belongs the Osmanli race, I believe without [Pg 17]exception, the ruling race of the north, and their kinsmen who founded Empires in Central and Southern Asia. The official classes, too, in most parts of the world are Hanefite, including the Viceregal courts of Egypt, Tripoli, and Tunis, and it would seem the courts of most of the Indian princes. It is probably rather as a consequence of this than as its reason that it is the most conservative of schools, conservative in the true sense of leaving things exactly as they are. The Turkish Ulema have always insisted strongly on the dogma that the ijtahad, that is to say the elaboration of new doctrine, is absolutely closed; that nothing can be added to or taken away from the already existing body of religious law, and that no new mujtahed, or doctor of Islam, can be expected who shall adapt that law to the life of the modern world. At the same time, while obstinate in matters of opinion, Hanefism has become extremely lax as to practice. Its moral teaching is held, and I believe justly, to be adapted only too closely to the taste of its chief supporters. It is accused by its enemies of having given the sanction of its toleration to the moral disorders common among the Turks, their use of fermented drinks, their immoderate concubinage and other worse [Pg 18]vices. It is, in fact, the official school of Ottoman orthodoxy. It embraces most of those who at the present day support the revived spiritual pretensions of Constantinople.

The pilgrimage then described in our table as Ottoman is mostly made up of men of this theological school. It must not, however, be supposed that anything like the whole number either of the 8500 pilgrims, or of the 22,000,000 population they represent, is composed of Turks. The true Ottoman Turk is probably now among the rarest of visitors to Mecca, and it is doubtful whether the whole Turkish census in Europe and in Asia amounts to more than four millions. With regard to the pilgrimage there is good reason why this should be the case. In Turkey, all the able-bodied young men, who are the first material of the Haj, are taken from other duties for military service, and hardly any now make their tour of the Kaaba except in the Sultan's uniform. Rich merchants, the second material of the Haj in other lands, are almost unknown among the Turks; and the officials, the only well-to-do class in the empire, have neither leisure nor inclination to absent themselves from their worldly business of intrigue.

Besides, the official Turk is already too civilized [Pg 19]to put up readily with the real hardships of the Haj. In spite of the alleviations effected by the steam navigation of the Red Sea, pilgrimage is still no small matter, and once landed at Jeddah, all things are much as they were a hundred years ago, while the Turk has changed. With his modern notion of dress and comfort he may indeed be excused for shrinking from the quaint nakedness of the pilgrim garb and the bare-headed march to Arafat under a tropical sun. Besides, there is the land journey still of three hundred miles to make before he can reach Medina, and what to some would be worse hardship, a wearisome waiting afterwards in the unhealthy ports of Hejaz. The Turkish official, too, has learned to dispense with so many of the forms of his religion that he finds no difficulty in making himself excuses here. In fact, he seldom or never now performs the pilgrimage.

The mass of the Ottoman Haj is made up of Kurds, Syrians, Albanians, Circassians, Lazis, and Tartars from Russia and the Khanates, of everything rather than real Turks. Nor are those that come distinguished greatly for their piety or learning. The school of St. Sophia at Constantinople has lost its old reputation as a seat of religious [Pg 20]knowledge; and its Ulema are known to be more occupied with the pursuit of Court patronage than with any other science. So much indeed is this the case that serious students often prefer a residence at Bokhara, or even in the heretical schools of Persia, as a more real road to learning. Turkey proper boasts at the present day few theologians of note, and still fewer independent thinkers.

The Egyptian Haj is far more flourishing. Speaking the language of Arabia, the citizen of Cairo is more at home in the holy places than any inhabitant of the northern towns can be. The customs of Hejaz are very nearly his own customs, and its climate not much more severe than his. Cairo, too, can boast a far more ancient political connection with Mecca than Constantinople can, for as early as the twelfth century the Sultans of Egypt were protectors of the holy places, while even since the Ottoman conquest, the Caliph's authority in Arabia has been almost uninterruptedly interpreted by his representative at Cairo. So lately as 1840 this was the position of things at Mecca, and it is only since the opening of the Suez Canal that direct administration from Constantinople has been seriously attempted. To the present day the Viceroy of Egypt shares with the [Pg 21]Sultan the privilege of sending a mahmal, or camel litter, to Mecca every year with a covering for the Kaaba. Moreover the Azhar mosque of Cairo is the great university of Arabic-speaking races, and its Ulema have the highest reputation of any in Islam. Egyptian influence, therefore, must be reckoned as an important element in the forces which make up Mohammedan opinion. The late Khedive, it is true, did much to impair this by his infidelity and his coquetteries with Europe, and under his reign the Egyptian Haj fell to a low level; but Mohammed Towfik, who is a sincere, though liberal Mussulman, has already restored much of his country's prestige at Mecca, and it is not unlikely that in time to come Egypt, grown materially prosperous, may once more take a leading part in the politics of Islam.[3] But of this later.

All three schools of theology are taught in the Azhar mosque, and Egyptians are divided, according to their class, between them. The Viceroy and the ruling clique, men of Ottoman origin, are Hanefites, and so too are the descendants of the [Pg 22]Circassian Beys, but the leading merchants of Cairo and the common people of that city are Shafites, while the fellahin of the Delta are almost entirely Malekite. Malekite, too, are the tribes west of the Nile, following the general rule of the population of Africa.[4]

The Malekite school of religious thought differs widely from the Hanefite. If the latter has been described as the high Church party of Islam, this must be described as the low. It is puritanical, fierce in its dogma, severe in its morals, and those who profess it are undoubtedly the most fervent, the most fanatical of believers. They represent more nearly than any other Mussulmans the ancient earnestness of the Prophet's companions, and the sword in their hand is ever the sword of God. Piety too, ostensible and sincere, is found everywhere among the Malekites. Abd el Kader, [Pg 23]the soldier saint, is their type; and holy men by hereditary profession abound among them.

The Malekites believe with earnest faith in things supernatural, dreaming prophetic dreams, and seeing miracles performed as every-day occurrences. With the Arabs of Africa, unlike their kinsmen in Arabia itself, to pray and fast is still a severe duty, and no class of Mussulmans are more devout on pilgrimage. In Algiers and Morocco it is as common for a young man of fortune to build a mosque as it is for him to keep a large stud of horses. To do so poses him in the world, and a life of prayer is strictly a life of fashion. With regard to morals he is severe where the Koran is severe, indulgent where it indulges. Wine with him is an abomination, and asceticism with regard to meat and tobacco is often practised by him. On the whole he is respectable and respected; but the reforms he would impose on Islam are too purely reactive to be altogether acceptable to the mass of Mohammedans or suited to the urgent necessities of the age. It is conceivable, however, that should the revival of Islam take the form of a religious war, the races of Africa may be found taking the leading part in it. Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco contain hardy [Pg 24]races of fighting men who may yet trouble Europe; and fifty years of rule have not yet assimilated the French Sahara.

It is difficult to gain accurate statistics as to the proportion of pilgrims sent to Mecca by these various States, but it would seem the Algerian pilgrimage is the smallest. This is due mainly to hindrances raised by the French Government, whose policy it is to isolate their province from the rest of the Mussulman world. An Algerian pilgrim is called upon to produce the sum of 1000 francs before he is permitted to embark for Jeddah, and he is subjected to various other needless formalities. Still the number sent is large and their fervour undoubted, though the upper classes, from a fear of losing credit with the French authorities, rather hold aloof.

The mainstay of the Mogrebbin Haj are the Moors. These have an immense name for zeal and religious courage at Mecca, and for the great scrupulosity with which they perform their religious duties. There is too among the Moors a far wider level of theological education than among most Mussulmans. I made acquaintance while at Jeddah with a young Arab from Shinghiat in Senegal who, Bedouin as he was, was an Alem, and one [Pg 25]sufficiently well versed in the Sheriat to be referred to more than once in my presence on points of religious law and literature. I expressed my surprise at finding a Bedouin thus learned, for he was evidently an Arab of the Arabs, but he told me his was no exceptional position, and that most Bedouins in Southern Morocco could read the Koran. The Moors would have a still higher position in Islam than that already given them were it not that they are on one point at variance with the mass of Sunites. They do not acknowledge the modern Caliphate. Those therefore of the Sunites who have acknowledged the Ottoman claim are at issue with the Moors. On all other points, however, the Moors are Sunites of the Sunites.

From the Moor to the negro is but a step, though it is a step of race, perhaps of species. The political and religious connection of Morocco with the Soudan is a very close one, and, whatever may be the future of the Mediterranean provinces fronting the Spanish coast, it cannot be doubted that the Moorish form of Mohammedanism will be perpetuated in Central Africa. It is there, indeed, that Islam has the best certainty of expansion and the fairest field for a propagation of its creed. Statistics, if they could be obtained, would, I am [Pg 26]convinced, show an immense Mohammedan progress within the last hundred years among the negro races, nor is this to be wondered at. Islam has so much to offer to the children of Ham that it cannot fail to win them—so much more than any form of Christianity or European progress can give.

The Christian missionary makes his way slowly in Africa. He has no true brotherhood to offer the negro except in another life. He makes no appeal to a present sense of dignity in the man he would convert. What Christian missionary takes a negress to wife or sits with the negro wholly as an equal at meat? Their relations remain at best those of teacher with taught, master with servant, grown man with child. The Mohammedan missionary from Morocco meanwhile stands on a different footing. He says to the negro, "Come up and sit beside me. Give me your daughter and take mine. All who pronounce the formula of Islam are equal in this world and in the next." In becoming a Mussulman even a slave acquires immediate dignity and the right to despise all men, whatever their colour, who are not as himself. This is a bribe in the hand of the preacher of the Koran, and one which has never appealed in [Pg 27]vain to the enslaved races of the world.[5] Central Africa then may be counted on as the inheritance of Islam at no very distant day. It is already said to count ten millions of Moslems.

The Shafite school, the third of the four "orthodox sects," is the most flourishing of all in point of numbers, and it has characteristics which mark it out as the one best adapted to survive in the struggle which is impending between the schools of religious thought in Islam. The Shafites may be compared to our broad Church, though without its immediate tendency to infidelity. With the Shafites there is a disposition to widen rather than to narrow the area of theology. The Hanefites and Malekites proclaim loudly that inquiry has been closed and change is impossible, but the Shafites are inclined to seek a new mujtahed who shall reconcile Islam with the modern conditions of the world. They feel that there is something wrong in things as they are, for Islam is no longer politically prosperous, and they would see it united once more and reorganized even at the expense of some dogmatic concessions. I know that many [Pg 28]even of the Shafites themselves will deny this, for no Mussulman will willingly acknowledge that he is an advocate of change; but it is unquestionable that among members of their school such ideas are more frequently found than with the others.

Among the Shafites, too, ideas of a moral reformation find a footing, and they speak more openly than the rest their suspicion that the house of Othman, with its fornications and its bestialities and contempt of justice, has been the ruin of Islam. Arabian custom is the basis of its ideas upon this head, for most Arabs out of Africa if anything are Shafites; and it is the school of the virtuous poor rather than of the licentious rich. It is more humane in its bearing towards Jews and Christians, finding a common ground with them in the worship of the one true God, the moral law propounded at various times to man, and the natural distinction between right and wrong. I may exaggerate this, perhaps, but something of it certainly exists, and it is a feeling that is growing.

Shafism has its stronghold at Cairo, where the Sheykh el Islam has always belonged to this rite, but it is also the prevailing school in Asia wherever Mohammedanism has been introduced through the instrumentality of Arabian missionaries. In [Pg 29]India the mass of the Mussulman population is Shafite, especially in Hyderabad and the Bombay Presidency, where the Arab element is strongest, while Hanefism is the school of the great people who derive their origin from the Mogul conquests, and of many of the Ulema who are in the habit of making their religious education complete in the Hanefite schools of Bokhara. Wahhabism, too, in the present century has taken great hold of the poorer classes, and within the last few years a Turkish propaganda has been at work among them with some success. But of this again later.

The Indian Haj is the most numerous, and represents the largest population of all on our list, and it is besides the most wealthy. The Indian Mussulman has less to fear from the climate of Arabia than the native of more northern lands, and few who can afford it fail to perform this religious duty at least once in their lives. The English Government neither checks nor encourages the Haj, and indeed of late years has shown a rather culpable negligence as to the interests of British subjects on pilgrimage. Such at least is the opinion I heard constantly given at Jeddah, and several recent incidents seem to prove that a little closer attention to this matter would be [Pg 30]advisable. That ugly story which was told in our newspapers more than a year ago of the abandonment of a pilgrim ship in the Red Sea by her British captain is, I am sorry to say, a true one, and I heard it confirmed with every circumstance which could aggravate the charges made. The captain in a fit of panic left the ship without any substantial excuse, and if it had not been for the good conduct of a young man, his nephew, who, though ordered to leave too, refused out of humanity, there is little doubt that the vessel would have been lost. A very painful impression was produced on the Jeddans while I was there by the news that this English captain had been sentenced for all punishment by an English court to two years' suspension of his certificate. Indian pilgrims have besides been very roughly treated in Hejaz by the authorities during the last year because they were British subjects, and this without obtaining any redress. Such at least is the gossip of the town. However this may be, it seems to me astonishing that so important a matter as the Indian Haj should be left, as it now is, entirely in the hands of chance.

The Dutch do not so leave the management of their pilgrimage from Java, which, it will be re[Pg 31]marked, stands second only to India on my list in respect of numbers. Their policy is a very definite one and seems justified by results. There is no disillusion, they argue, for a Mussulman greater than to have visited Mecca, and they say that a returned hajji is seldom heard to complain in Java of his lot as the subject of a Christian power. Besides the disappointment which all pilgrims are wont to feel who come with exalted hopes and find their holy lands undistinguishable from the other lands of the world, the pilgrim to Mecca certainly has to encounter a series of dangers and annoyances which he cannot but recognize to be the result of Mussulman misgovernment. From the moment of his landing on the holy shore he finds himself beset with dangers. He is fleeced by the Turkish officials, befooled by the religious touts of the towns, and sometimes robbed openly by actual highway robbers. The religious government of the land has no redress to offer him, and the Turkish guardians of the peace who affect to rule are only potent in demanding fees. At every step he is waylaid and tricked and ill-treated. He finds the Hejazi, the keepers of the holy places and privileged ciceroni of the shrines, shrewder as men of business than devout as believers, and he [Pg 32]returns to his home a sadder and, the Dutch say, a wiser man. I do not affirm that the Dutch are right; but this is the principle they act on, and they boast of its success.

We in India, as I have said, in our grand careless way, leave all these things to chance. India, nevertheless, still holds the first rank in the Haj, and, all things considered, is now the most important land where the Mohammedan faith is found. In the day of its greatness the Mogul Empire was second to no State in Islam, and though its political power is in abeyance, the religion itself is by no means in decay. India has probably a closer connection at the present moment with Mecca than any other country, and it is looked upon by many there as the Mussulman land of the future. Indeed, it may safely be affirmed that the course of events in India will determine more than anything else the destiny of Mohammedanism in the immediate future of this and the next generation.

The Malays, though holding no very high position in the commonwealth of Islam, are important from their numbers, their commercial prosperity, and, more than all to an European observer, from the fact that so many of them are [Pg 33]Dutch subjects. Holland, if any lesson for the future can be learned in history, must in a few years find her fate linked with that of Germany, and so too her colonies. I will not now enlarge upon the prospect thus opened, but it is a suggestive one, and worthy of all possible attention. For the moment the Malays stand rather apart from other pilgrims at the shrines. They boast no great school of theology or particular religious complexion; and as pilgrims they are held in rather low esteem from their penurious ways. But they are a dark element in the future, which it is equally easy to under as to over rate. Originally converted by, and to a certain degree descended from, Arabs, they are, as far as I could learn, followers of the Shafite teaching, and inclined to the broad rather than the narrow ways of Islam. They number, according to the Dutch consular agent at Jeddah, thirty million souls, and are increasing rapidly both in Java and in the other islands of the Malay archipelago.

Another enigma are the Chinese. I saw a few of them in the streets, and made inquiries as to them. But I could gain no certain information. I have heard them estimated as high as twenty millions and as low as five, but it is certain that [Pg 34]they are very numerous.[6] They established themselves in China, it is said, about the second century of Islam, and their missionaries were men of Arab race. They are found scattered in groups all over China, but principally inland, and have full enjoyment of their religion, being a united body which is respectable and makes itself respected—so much so that the "Houi-tse," or people of the resurrection, as they are called, are employed in the highest offices of the Chinese State.[7] It is plain, however, that they are hardly at all connected with the modern life of Islam, for it is only within the last few years that any of them have performed the pilgrimage; and if I include them in my lists as Sunites and Shafites it is in default of other classification. They probably hold to the Mussulman world a position analogous in its isolation to that of the Abyssinian Church in Christendom. They too, however, may one day make their existence felt; for China is no dead nation, only asleep. And with them our survey of orthodox Islam ends.

The heretical sects remain to us. Of these the [Pg 35]most notable without contestation is the Shiite, or Sect of Ali, which traces its origin to the very day of the Prophet's death, when Abu Bekr was elected Caliph to Ali's exclusion. I will not here renew the arguments urged in this old dispute more than to say that the dispute still exists, though it has long ceased to be the only cause of difference between Shiah and Suni.

Beginning merely as a political schism, the Shiite sect is now distinctly a heresy, and one which has wandered far from the orthodox road. Their principal features of quarrel with the Sunites are—first, a repudiation of the Caliphate and of all hierarchical authority whatsoever; secondly, the admission of a right of free judgment in individual doctors on matters of religion; and thirdly, a general tendency to superstitious beliefs unauthorized by the Koran or by the written testimony of the Prophet's companions. They also—and this is their great doctrinal quarrel with the unitarian Sunites—believe in a series of incarnations of the twelve qualities of God in the persons of the "twelve Imams," and in the advent of the last of them as a Messiah, or "Móhdy," doctrines which are especially advanced by the Sheykhi school of Shiism and minimized by the Mutesharreh [Pg 36]or orthodox. These last matters, however, are rather excrescences than necessary parts of Shiism. They owe their prevalence, without doubt, to the Persian mind, which is equally prone to scepticism and credulity, and where Shiism has always had its stronghold.

The religious constitution of the sect of Ali has been described to me by a member of it who knows Europe well as resembling in its organization the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. That is to say, it acknowledges no head, temporal or spiritual, and each congregation represents a separate unit of authority in itself. There is no such functionary in Persia as Sheykh el Islam, or Grand Mufti, and the Shah claims to be neither Imam nor Caliph. Each Shiite doctor who has taken his degree at Kerbela or Ispahan may deliver his fetwa or opinion on points of doctrine, and the only test of his authority to preach or lead the prayer in mosque is his power of attracting a congregation. It is strange that in a sect which had its origin in an assertion of hereditary right to the Caliphate everything hereditary should be now rigidly excluded.

In theory, I believe the Shias still hold that there is an Imam and Caliph, but they will not tolerate [Pg 37]the pretension of any one now in authority to the title, and leave it in abeyance until the advent of the Móhdy, or guide, who is to reunite Islam and restore its fortunes. So much is this the case that, sovereign though he be and absolute master in Persia, the Shah is to the present day looked upon by the Persians as a usurper, and he himself acknowledges the fact in a rather curious ceremony. It is a maxim with Mussulmans of all sects that prayer is not valid if made in another man's house without his permission, and this being so, and the Shah admitting that his palaces of right belong not to himself but to the Móhdy, he is obliged to lease them according to legal form from an alem or mujtahed, acting for the supposed Móhdy, before he can pray in them to his spiritual profit.

It will be readily understood that, with such an organization and with such tendencies to deductive reasoning, a wide basis is given for divergence of opinion among the Shiites, and that while the more highly educated of their mollahs occasionally preach absolute pantheism, others consult the grosser inclinations of the vulgar, and indulge their hearers with the most extravagant tales of miracle and superstition. These are a constant [Pg 38]source of mockery to the Sunites. Among the more respectable Shiite beliefs, however, there seems to be a general conviction in Persia that a reform of Islam is at hand, and that a new leader may be expected at any moment and from any quarter, so that enthusiasts are constantly found simulating the gifts of inspiration and affecting a divine mission. The history of the Babites, so well described by M. de Gobineau in his Religions of Asia, is a case in point, and similar occurrences are by no means rare in Persia.

I met at Jeddah a highly educated Persian gentleman, who informed me that he had himself been witness when a boy to a religious prodigy, notorious, if I remember rightly, at Tabriz. On that occasion, one of these prophets being condemned to death by the supreme government, was bound to a cross with two of his companions, and after remaining suspended thus for several hours, was fired at by the royal troops. It then happened that, while the companions were dispatched at the first volley, the prophet himself remained unhurt, and, incredible to relate, the cords which bound him were cut by the bullets, and he fell to the ground on his feet. "You Christians," said another Persian gentleman once to me, "talk of [Pg 39]your Christ as the Son of God and think it strange, but with us the occurrence is a common one. Believe me we have 'sons of God' in nearly all our villages."

Thus, with the Shiites, extremes meet. No Moslems more readily adapt themselves to the superficial atheisms of Europe than do the Persians, and none are more ardently devout, as all who have witnessed the miracle play of the two Imams will be obliged to admit. Extremes, too, of morality are seen, fierce asceticisms and gross licentiousnesses. By no sect of Islam is the duty of pilgrimage more religiously observed, or the prayers and ablutions required by their rule performed with a stricter ritual. But the very pilgrims who go on foot to Mecca scruple not to drink wine there, and Persian morality is everywhere a byword.

In all these circumstances there is much to fear as well as to hope on the side of the Shiite sect; but their future only indirectly involves that of Islam proper. Their whole census does not probably exceed fifteen millions, and it shows no tendency to increase. Outside Persia we find about one million Irâki Arabs, a few in Syria and Afghanistan, and at most five millions in India. [Pg 40]One small group still maintains itself in the neighbourhood of Medina, where it is tolerated rather than acknowledged, and a few Shiites are to be found in most of the large cities of the west, but everywhere the sect of Ali stands apart from and almost in a hostile attitude to the rest of Islam. It is noticeable, however, that within the last fifty years the religious bitterness of Shiite and Sunite is sensibly in decline.

The next most important of the heretical sects is the Abadiyeh. These, according to some, are the religious descendants of the Khawarij, a sect which separated itself from the Califate in the time of the Seyid Ali, and, after a severe persecution in Irak, took refuge at last in Oman. Whatever their present doctrines, they seem at first to have been like the Shiites, political schismatics. They maintained that any Mussulman, so long as he was not affected with heresy, might be chosen Imam, and that he might be deposed for heresy or ill-conduct, and indeed that there was no absolute necessity for any Imam at all. They are at present only found in Oman and Zanzibar, where they number, it is said, about four millions. Till as late as the last century the Imamate was an elective office among them, but [Pg 41]with the accession of the Abu Saïd dynasty it became hereditary in that family.[8] They reject all communion with the Sunites, but I have not been able to discover that they hold any doctrines especially offensive to the mass of Moslems. Their differences are mainly negative, and consist in the rejection of Califal history and authority later than the reign of Omar, and of a vast number of traditions now incorporated in the Sunite faith.

Allied to them but, as I understood, separate, are the Zeïdites of Yemen, who are possibly also descended from the Khawarij. But, as the Zeïdites are accustomed to conceal the fact of their heresy and to pass themselves when on pilgrimage as Sunites, I could learn little about them. They were, till ten years ago, independent under the Imams of Sana, and it is certain that they repudiate the Califate. In former times, before the first conquest of Arabia by the Turks, these Imams were all powerful in Hejaz, and on the destruction of the Bagdad Califate assumed the title of Hami el Harameyn, protector of the holy places. The Turks, however, now occupy Sana, and the office of Imam is in abeyance. The Zeïdites can hardly number more than two millions, and their only [Pg 42]importance in the future lies in the fact of their geographical proximity to Mecca, and in the fact that their sympathies lie on the side of liberality in opinion and reform in morals. Neither Zeïdites nor Abadites have any adherents out of their own countries.

Of the Wahhabites a more detailed account is needed, as although their numbers are small and their political importance less than it formerly was, the spirit of their reform movement still lives and exercises a potent influence on modern Mohammedan ideas. I have described elsewhere[9] the historical vicissitudes of the sect in Arabia, and the decline of its fortunes in Nejd, but a brief recapitulation of these may be allowed me.

The early half of the last century was a period of religious stagnation in Islam, almost as much as it was in Christendom. Faith, morals, and religious practice were at the lowest ebb among Mussulmans, and it seemed to Europeans who looked on as though the faith of Mecca had attained its dotage, and was giving place to a non-curantist infidelity. Politically and religiously the Mussulman world was asleep, when suddenly it awoke, and like a young giant refreshed stood once [Pg 43]more erect in Arabia. The reform preached by Abd el Wahhab was radical. He began by breaking with the maxim held by the mass of the orthodox that inquiry on matters of faith was closed. He constituted himself a new mujtahed and founded a new school, neither Hanafite, Malekite, nor Shafite, and called it the school of the Unitarians, Muwaheddin, a name still cherished by the Wahhabites. He rejected positively all traditions but those of the companions of the Prophet, and he denied the claims of any but the first four Caliphs to have been legitimately elected. The Koran was to be the only written law, and Islam was to be again what it had been in the first decade of its existence. He established it politically in Nejd on precisely its old basis at Medina, and sought to extend it over the whole of Arabia, perhaps of the world. I believe it is hardly now recognised by Mohammedans how near Abd el Wahhab was to complete success.

Before the close of the eighteenth century the chiefs of the Ibn Saouds, champions of Unitarian Islam, had established their authority over all Northern Arabia as far as the Euphrates, and in 1808 they took Mecca and Medina. In the meanwhile the Wahhabite doctrines were gaining ground [Pg 44]still further afield. India was at one time very near conversion, and in Egypt, and North Africa, and even in Turkey many secretly subscribed to the new doctrines. Two things, however, marred the plan of general reform and prevented its full accomplishment.

In the first place the reform was too completely reactive. It took no account whatever of the progress of modern thought, and directly it attempted to leave Arabia it found itself face to face with difficulties which only political as well as religious success could overcome. It was impossible, except by force of arms, to Arabianise the world again, and nothing less than this was in contemplation. Its second mistake, and that was one that a little of the Prophet's prudence which always went hand in hand with his zeal might have avoided, was a too rigid insistance upon trifles. Abd el Wahhab condemned minarets and tombstones because neither were in use during the first years of Islam. The minarets therefore were everywhere thrown down, and when the holy places of Hejaz fell into the hands of his followers the tombs of saints which had for centuries been revered as objects of pilgrimage were levelled to the ground. Even the Prophet's tomb at Medina [Pg 45]was laid waste and the treasures it contained distributed among the soldiers of Ibn Saoud. This roused the indignation of all Islam, and turned the tide of the Wahhabite fortunes. Respectable feeling which had hitherto been on their side now declared itself against them, and they never after regained their position as moral and social reformers.

Politically, too, it was the cause of their ruin. The outside Mussulman world, looking upon them as sacrilegious barbarians, was afraid to visit Mecca, and the pilgrimage declined so rapidly that the Hejazi became alarmed. The source of their revenue they found cut off, and it seemed on the point of ceasing altogether. Then they appealed to Constantinople, urging the Sultan to vindicate his claim to be protector of the holy places. What followed is well known. After the peace of Paris Sultan Mahmud commissioned Mehemet Ali to deliver Mecca and Medina from the Wahhabite heretics, and this he in time effected. The war was carried into Nejd; Deriyeh, their capital, was sacked, and Ibn Saoud himself taken prisoner and decapitated in front of St. Sophia's at Constantinople. The movement of reform in Islam was thus put back for, perhaps, another hundred years.

[Pg 46]Still the seed cast by Abd el Wahhab has not been entirely without fruit. Wahhabism, as a political regeneration of the world, has failed, but the spirit of reform has remained. Indeed, the present unquiet attitude of expectation in Islam has been its indirect result. Just as the Lutheran reformation in Europe, though it failed to convert the Christian Church, caused its real reform, so Wahhabism has produced a real desire for reform if not yet reform itself in Mussulmans. Islam is no longer asleep, and were another and a wiser Abd el Wahhab to appear, not as a heretic, but in the body of the Orthodox sect, he might play the part of Loyola or Borromeo with success.

The present condition of the Wahhabites as a sect is one of decline. In India, and I believe in other parts of Southern Asia, their missionaries still make converts and their preachers are held in high esteem. But at home in Arabia their zeal has waxed cold, giving place to liberal ideas which in truth are far more congenial to the Arabian mind. The Ibn Saoud dynasty no longer holds the first position in Nejd, and Ibn Rashid who has taken their place, though nominally a Wahhabite, has little of the Wahhabite fanaticism. He is in fact a popular and national rather than a religious [Pg 47]leader, and though still designated at Constantinople as a pestilent heretic, is counted as their ally by the more liberal Sunites. It is probable that he would not withhold his allegiance from a Caliph of the legitimate house of Koreysh. But this, too, is beyond the subject of the present chapter.

With the Wahhabites, then, our census of Islam closes. It has given us, as I hope, a fairly accurate view of the forces which make up the Mohammedan world, and though the enumeration of these cannot but be dull work, I do not think it will have been work done in vain. Without it indeed it would be almost impossible to make clear the problem presented to us by modern Islam or guess its solution. More interesting matter, however, lies before us, and in my next chapter I propose to introduce my reader to that burning question of the day in Asia, the Caliphate, and explain the position of the House of Othman towards the Mohammedan world.

[Pg 48]

CHAPTER II.

THE MODERN QUESTION OF THE CALIPHATE.

About the year 1515 of our era (921 of the Hejra), Selim I., Padishah of the Ottoman Turks and Emperor of Constantinople, finding himself the most powerful prince of his day in Islam, and wishing still further to consolidate his rule, conceived the idea of reviving in his own person the extinct glories of the Caliphate. He had more than one claim to be considered their champion by orthodox Mohammedans, for he was the grandson of that Mahomet II. who had finally extinguished the Roman Empire of the East, and he had himself just ended a successful campaign against the heretical Shah of Persia, head of the Sect of Ali. His only rivals among Sunite princes were the Sultan el Hind, or, as we call him, the Great Mogul, the Sultan el Gharb, or Emperor of Morocco, and the Mameluke Sultan of Egypt, then known to the world as par excellence the Sultan.

[Pg 49]With the two former, as rulers of what were remote lands of Islam, Selim seems to have troubled himself little; but he made war on Egypt. In 1516 he invaded Syria, its outlying province, and in 1517 he entered Cairo. There he made prisoner the reigning Mameluke, Kansaw el Ghouri, and had him publicly beheaded, or according to another account, received his head from a soldier, who had killed him where he lay on the ground after falling (for the Sultan was an old man) from his horse. He then, in virtue of a very doubtful cession made to him of his rights by one Motawakkel Ibn Omar el Hakim, a descendant of the house of Abbas, whom he found living as titular Caliph in Cairo, took to himself the following style and title: Sultan es Salatin, wa Hakan el Hawakin, Malek el Bahreyn, wa Hami el Barreyn, Khalifeh Rasul Allah, Emir el Mumenin, wa Sultan, wa Khan—titles which may be thus interpreted: King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Monarch of the two seas (the Mediterranean and the Red Sea), and Protector of the two lands (Hejaz and Syria, the holy lands of Islam), Successor of the Apostle of God, Prince of the Faithful, and Emperor. It is said that he first had the satisfaction of hearing his name mentioned in the [Pg 50]public prayers as Caliph when he visited the great mosque of Zacharias at Aleppo on his return northwards in 1519.[10]

Such, in a few words, is historically the origin of the modern Caliphate, and such are the titles now borne by Selim's descendant, Abd el Hamid. It is difficult at this distance of time, and in the absence of detailed contemporary narratives, to do more than guess the effect on Mussulmans of his day of Selim's religious pretensions. To all alike, friends as well as foes, he must in the first instance have appeared as an usurper, for before him no man not of the house of Koreysh, and so a kinsman of their Prophet, had ever claimed to be his spiritual heir. Indeed, it was a maxim with all schools of theology of all ages that descent from the Koreysh was the first title to the Caliphate; but we may reasonably suppose that within the limits of his own dominions, and even to the mass of the vulgar beyond them, the Ottoman Emperor's sublime proceedings met with approval.

[Pg 51]Selim was a portentous figure in Islam; and the splendour of his apparition in the north dazzled the eyes of all. Mussulmans must have seen in him and his house the restorers of their political fortunes and the champion of their religion against Christendom; and a departure from established rule in his favour may well have seemed justified to pious persons as the best hope for the future of their creed. Selim was already temporal lord of the greater part of Islam, and he might be expected thus to restore the spiritual sovereignty also. Besides, to the ears of Mussulmans of the sixteenth century, the Caliphal title was no longer a familiar sound, and the title of Sultan which Selim already bore was that of the highest temporal authority they knew.

The Caliphate, if it existed at all, was in the modern world a less imposing name than the Sultanate; and the two had since the destruction of Bagdad become confused, as they still remain, in men's minds who do not any more now make common use of the older title. Thus it was not difficult for the new Sultan of Damascus and Cairo and Medina to impose himself on the multitude—not merely as heir to the Caliphal possessions, but to the title also of the Caliphs [Pg 52]and their spiritual rank. Advantage, too, seems to have been taken in the first instance, as it has been subsequently, of the accidental resemblance of name between Othman, Selim's ancestor, and Othman the third Caliph. The vulgar ear caught the sound as one familiar to it, and was satisfied, for there is all the world in a name.

With the Ulema, however, it was necessary to be more precise; and we know that the question of the Ottoman right to the spiritual succession of the Prophet was one long and hotly debated in the schools. Tradition was formal on the point of excluding aliens to the Koreysh from this its legal inheritance, for Mohammed himself had repeatedly distinguished his own tribe as being the sole heirs to his authority; nor would any doctor of the specially Arabian schools listen to a departure from ideas so absolute. The Hanefite school, however, representing those chiefly interested in accepting the Ottoman pretension, undertook its legal defence, and succeeded, in spite of the one great obstacle of birth, in making out a very tolerable case for themselves and the Beni Othman—a case which, in the absence of any rival candidate to oppose to them, has since been tacitly accepted by the majority of the Sunite Ulema.

[Pg 53]The difficulty, however, was in practice settled by a compromise, and the dispute itself had long been forgotten by all but the learned, until within the present generation its arguments were once more dragged out publicly to serve a political purpose. The Hanefite arguments are on this account interesting, and I have been at pains to ascertain and understand them; but perhaps before I state them in detail it will be best first briefly to run over the Caliphal history of an earlier age and describe the state of things which Selim's act superseded.

Orthodox Mussulman writers recognize four distinct phases which the office of Khalifeh has undergone, and four distinct periods of its history. The word Khalifeh, derived from the Arabic root khalafa, to "leave behind," signifies literally one left behind, and in the legal sense the relict or successor of the prophet and heir to his temporal and spiritual power.

The first historical phase noticed is one of pure theocracy, in which the Caliph or successor of Mohammed was saint as well as priest and king, and was to a certain extent inspired. It lasted thirty years only, and is represented by the four great Caliphs—Abu Bekr, Omar, Othman, and [Pg 54]Ali—who receive from the faithful when they speak of them the title of Seydna, or Our Lord.

The second phase, which lasted nearly six hundred years, is that of the Arabian monarchy, in which the Caliphate took the shape of hereditary temporal dominion. Its representatives are neither saints nor doctors of the law, and stand on a quite different footing from those who precede them. They begin with Mawiyeh ibn Ommiyah, founder of the Ommiad dynasty, and end with Mostasem Billah, the last Sultan of the Abbasides.

The third period is a phase of temporal inter-regnum during which for nearly three hundred years the Khalifeh exercised no sovereign rights, and resided as a spiritual chief only, or as we should now say Sheykh el Islam, at Cairo. The temporal authority of Islam, which is theoretically supposed to have been continued without break even during this period, was then in delegation with the Memluk Sultans of Egypt and other Mussulman princes.

The last phase is that of the Ottoman Caliphate.

As nearly all modern arguments respecting the Caliphate appeal to examples in the earliest period, it will be well to consider the origin of its institution and the political basis of Islam [Pg 55]itself. Mohammedan doctors affirm that the Apostle of God, Mohammed (on whose name be peace), when he fled from Mecca, did so not as a rebellious citizen but as a pretender to authority. He was by birth a prince of the princely house of the Koreysh, itself the noblest tribe of Hejaz, and his grandfather had been supreme ruler in Mecca. He established himself, therefore, with his companions in exile as head of an independent political community, following in this the ancient custom of Arabia where sections constantly cut themselves off from the parent tribe and form new nations under the separate leadership of one or another member of their princely families. Islam, therefore, was from its commencement a political as well as a religious body, and while Mohammed preached to his disciples as a prophet, he also gave laws to them as their king and governor. He was their Imam, the leader of their prayer, and he was their Emir and Kadi, prince and magistrate. Thus the supreme temporal and spiritual authority became linked, and Islam was from its beginning a nation no less than a church.

As long as Mohammed lived, this state of things remained unquestioned, and difficulties began only at his death. It is a point which has been much [Pg 56]disputed what were the prophet's intentions regarding this event. In early times the sect of Ali maintained that he had appointed his son-in-law his heir, and others have held that Abu Bekr had the nomination; but Sunites are now mostly agreed that no individual appointment was made, and that the choice of a successor was left to be decided by election. In any case the procedure followed by Mohammed's bereaved followers was elective, and its details were in strict accordance with that Arabian custom on which the Koranic law is mainly built.

Now, in an Arab tribe, when the Sheykh dies, the elders of the tribe, heads of its great houses and sections, assemble in one of their number's tent and, sitting in a circle, discuss the subject of his succession. Theoretically, the choice of a successor is open to any one of them, for the tribe, however large, is all one great family, descended from a common ancestor, and though no one from without could be admitted to the supreme rule, any one from within the tribe can hold office. But in practice the choice is limited to a few persons. The reverence of the Arabs for blood, and for selected strains of blood, prevent them, except in very exceptional cases, from changing the dynasty [Pg 57]of their rulers. If the dead man has left behind him a son of full age and respectable qualities, he will, without dispute, be acknowledged Sheykh. If not, an uncle, a nephew, or a cousin will be chosen. Only in extreme circumstances of general danger, or of failure of heirs male, can the member of a new family reasonably aspire to power. Moreover, there is no uniform law of election. The meeting does not pretend to give a right, only to confirm one; for the right lies not with the electors but with him who can maintain his election. There is, therefore, no formal system of voting, but the elders having ascertained who among the dead man's relations commands the strongest following, proceed to acknowledge him by the ceremony of giving him their hands. He then becomes their Sheykh. It sometimes happens, however, that parties are so evenly divided between rival leaders that the tribe divides, one section going this way and the other that, until one of the leaders gives in his submission; otherwise the quarrel is decided by the sword.

All these features of the Arabian tribal system of succession may be noticed in the first elections to the Caliphate. As soon as it was known that Mohammed was indeed dead, a conclave com[Pg 58]posed of the elders and chief men of Islam, self-constituted and recognizing no special popular mandate, assembled in the house of Omar ibn el Khattub. This conclave is known to jurists as the Ahl el helli wa el agde, the people of the loosing and the knotting, because they assumed the duty of solving the knotty question of succession. A nice point had to be decided, just such a one as has in all ages been the cause of civil war in Arabia. The Prophet had left no son, but more than one near relation. Moreover, at that moment the new nation of Islam was in danger of internal disruption, and the religious and the civil elements in it were on the point of taking up arms against each other. The two chief candidates were Ali ibn Abutaleb and Abu Bekr, the one son-in-law and cousin and the other father-in-law of Mohammed—Ali represented the civil, Abu Bekr the religious party; and as it happened that the latter party was predominant at Medina, it was on Abu Bekr that the choice fell. He was recognized as head of the more powerful faction, and the chiefs gave him their hands; while civil war was only prevented by the magnanimous submission of Ali.

This form of succession is held by most Sunite doctors to be the authentic form intended by the [Pg 59]Prophet, nor did the three following elections differ from it in any essential point. It is only noticed that Abu Bekr designated Omar as the most fitting person to succeed him, and so in a measure directed the choice of the Ahl el agde. The Caliph was in each instance elected by the elders at Medina, and the choice confirmed by its general acknowledgment elsewhere.

In the time of Ali, however, a new principle began to make its appearance, which foreshadowed a change in the nature of the Caliphate. The election of Abu Bekr, as I have said, was determined by the predominant religious feeling of the day. He was the holiest man in Islam, and his government was throughout strictly theocratic. He not only administered the religious law, but was its interpreter and architect. He sat every day in the mejlis, or open court of justice, and decided there questions of divinity as well as of jurisprudence. He publicly led the prayer in the Mosque, expounded the Koran, and preached every Friday from the pulpit. He combined in his person all the functions now divided between the Sheykh el Islam, the grand Mufti, and the executive authorities. He was king and priest and magistrate, doctor of civil and religious law, and [Pg 60]supreme referee on all matters whether of opinion or practice; he was, in a word, the Pope of Islam. Nor did his three successors abate anything of Abu Bekr's pretensions. The only power they delegated was the command of the Mussulman armies, which were then overrunning the world, and the government of the provinces these had conquered.

Ali, however, when he at last succeeded to the Caliphate, found himself opposed by the very party whose candidate he had once been, and this party had gathered strength in the interval. With the conquest of the world worldly ideas had filled the hearts of Mussulmans, and a strong reaction also had set in in favour of those specially national ideas of Arabia which religious fervour had hitherto held in check. It was natural, indeed inevitable, that this should be the case, for many conquered nations had embraced the faith of Islam, and, as Mussulmans, had become the equals of their conquerors, so that what elements of pride existed in these found their gratification in ideas of race and birth rather than of religion, ideas which the conquered races could not share, and which were the special inheritance of Arabia.

The national party, then, had been reinforced, at [Pg 61]the expense of the religious, among the Koreysh, who were still at the head of all the affairs of State. Their leader was Mawiyeh Ibn Ommiyeh, a man of distinguished ability and of that charm of manner which high-born Arabs know so well how to use to their political ends. He had for some years been Governor of Syria, and was more popular there than the pious Ali; and Syria, though not yet the nominal, was already the real seat of the Mussulman Government. Mawiyeh therefore refused to accept Ali's election at Medina as valid, and finding himself supported by a rival Ahl el agde at Damascus, made that appeal to the sword which Arabian usage sanctions as the ultimate right of all pretenders.

Religious writers agree in condemning Mawiyeh for his revolt; and while his succession to Ali is accepted as legal, they place him on quite a different level from the four Caliphs who preceded him. In Mawiyeh they see fulfilled that prediction of their Prophet which announced that Islam should be ruled for thirty years by an Imam, and ever after by a King. Mawiyeh is, indeed, the type of all the later Mohammedan Emperors. According to canon law, the head of the State is also head of the religion; but Mawiyeh ceased [Pg 62]to exercise religious functions in person. These, unlike his predecessors, he delegated to others, and neither led the prayer nor preached; nor was he held to be either the best or the most learned man in Islam, as Abu Bekr and the rest had been. Moreover—and this is the chief point noticed regarding him—he introduced the system of dynastic heredity into the Caliphate, nominating his son Yezid his successor in his own lifetime. The change, advantageous as it was politically, is regarded as a religious falling off. Henceforth the Caliphs, whether of the Ommiad or afterwards of the Abbaside families, were not in reality elected, though the form of confirmation by the Ulema was gone through; and they affected to succeed by right of birth, not by the voice of the people.

During the whole period of the Arabian Caliphate we only notice one Prince of the Faithful who busied himself much with religious learning, and few who personally exercised the magisterial functions. Only once we read of an Abbaside Caliph insisting on his right of leading the prayer, and this was probably the effect of an accidental jealousy. As a rule the temporal government of Islam was intrusted to a Sadrazzam, or Grand Vizier, the spiritual duty of prayer to a Naïb, or [Pg 63]deputy Imam, and the elaboration or interpretation of law and doctrine to such Ulema or Mujtaheddin as could command a following. The character of the Khalifeh, however, was still essentially sacred. He was of the Koreysh and of the blood of the Prophet, and so was distinct from the other princes of the world. As their political power decayed, the Abbasides fell indeed into the hands of adventurers who even occasionally used them as puppets for their own ambitious ends; but the office was respected, and neither the Kurdish Saladdin, nor Togral Bey, nor Malek Shah, nor any of the Seljukian Emirs el Amara dared meddle personally with the title of Caliph.

The Ommiad dynasty, founded by Mawiyeh, reigned at Damascus eighty-five years, and was then succeeded on a new appeal to the sword in a.d. 750 by the descendants of another branch of the Koreysh—the Beni Abbas—who transferred the capital of Islam to Bagdad, and survived as temporal sovereigns there for five hundred years.

This second period of Islam, though containing her greatest glories and her highest worldly prosperity, is held to be less complete by divines than the first thirty years which had preceded it. Islam was no longer one. To say nothing of the Persian [Pg 64]and Arabian schisms, the orthodox world itself was divided, and rival Caliphs had established themselves independently in Spain and Egypt. Moreover, during the last two centuries the temporal power of the Caliphs was practically in delegation to the Seljuk Turks, who acted as mayors of the palace, and their spiritual power was unsupported by any show of sanctity or learning. It was terminated forcibly by the pagan Holagu, who at the head of the Mongols sacked Bagdad in 1258.

The third period of Caliphal history saw all temporal power wrested from the Caliphs. Islam, on the destruction of the Arabian monarchy, resolved itself into a number of separate States, each governed by its own Bey or Sultan, who in his quality of temporal prince was head also of religion within his own dominions. The Mongols, converted to the Faith of Mecca, founded a Mohammedan empire in the east; the Seljuk Turks, replaced by the Ottoman, reigned in Asia Minor; the Barbary States had their own rulers; and Egypt was governed by that strange dynasty of slaves, the Mameluke Sultans. Nowhere was a supreme temporal head of Islam to be seen, and the name of Khalifeh as that of a reigning sove[Pg 65]reign ceased any longer to be heard of in the world. Only the nominal succession of the Prophet was obscurely preserved at Cairo, whither the survivors of the family of Abbas had betaken themselves on the massacre of their house at Bagdad.

It is difficult to ascertain the precise position of these titular Caliphs under the Mameluke monarchy in Egypt. That they were little known to the world in general is certain; and one is sometimes tempted to suspect the complete authenticity of the succession preserved through them. Contemporary Christian writers do not mention them, and it is evident from Sir John Mandeville and others that in Egypt the Egyptian Sultan himself was talked of as head of the Mussulman religion. I have heard their position compared with that of the present Sheykhs el Islam at Constantinople—that is to say, they were appointed by the Sultan, and were made use of by him as a means of securing Mussulman allegiance—and I believe this to have been all their real status. They are cited, however, as in some sense sovereigns by Hanefite teachers, whose argument it is that the succession of the Prophet has never lapsed, or Islam been without a recognized temporal head. [Pg 66]The Sultans, neither of Egypt nor of India, nor till Selim's time of the Turkish Empire, ever claimed for themselves the title of Khalifeh, nor did the Sherifal family of Mecca, who alone of them might have claimed it legally as Koreysh. Neither did Tamerlane nor any of the Mussulman Mongols who reigned at Bagdad. The fact is, we may assume the Caliphate was clean forgotten at the time Selim bethought him of it as an instrument of power.

It must, then, have been an interesting and startling novelty with Mussulmans to hear of this new pretender to the ancient dignity—interesting, because the name Khalifeh was connected with so many of the bygone glories of Islam; startling, because he who claimed it seemed by birth incapable of doing so. The Hanefite Ulema, however, as I have said, undertook Selim's defence, or rather that of his successors, for Selim himself died not a year afterwards, and succeeded in proving, to the satisfaction of the majority of Sunites, that the house of Othman had a good and valid title to the rank they had assumed. Their chief arguments were as follows. The house of Othman, they asserted, ruled spiritually by—

1. The right of the sword, that is to say, the [Pg 67]de facto possession of the sovereign title. It was argued that, the Caliphate being a necessity (and this all orthodox Mussulmans admit), it was also necessary that the de facto holder of the title should be recognized as legally the Caliph, until a claimant with a better title should appear. Now the first qualification of a claimant was that he should claim, and the second that he should be supported by a party; and Selim had both claimed the Caliphate and supported his pretensions at the head of an army. He had challenged the world to produce a rival, and no rival had been found—none, at least, which the Hanefite school acknowledged, for the Sultan of Morocco they had never accepted, and the last descendant of the Abbasides had waived his rights. In support of the proposition that the sword could give a title they cited the examples of Mawiyeh, who thus established his right against the family of Ali, and of Abu el Abbas, who had thus established his against that of Mawiyeh.

2. Election, that is the sanction of a legal body of Elders. It was argued that, as the Ahl el agde had been removed from Medina to Damascus, and from Damascus to Bagdad, and from Bagdad to Cairo, so it had been once more legally removed [Pg 68]from Cairo to Constantinople. Selim had brought with him to St. Sophia's some of the Ulema of the Azhar mosque in Cairo, and these, in conjunction with the Turkish Ulema, had elected him or ratified his election. A form of election is to the present day observed at Constantinople in token of this right; and each new Sultan of the house of Othman, as he succeeds to the temporal sovereignty of Turkey, must wait before being recognized as Caliph till he has received the sword of office at the hands of the Ulema. This ceremony it is customary to perform in the mosque of Ayub.

3. Nomination. Sultan Selim, as has been already said, obtained from Mutawakkel, a descendant of the Abbasides and himself titularly Caliph, a full cession of all the Caliphal rights of that family. The fact, as far as it goes, is historical, and the only flaw in the argument would seem to be that Mutawakkel had no right thus to dispose of a title to an alien, which was his own only in virtue of his birth. The case, indeed, was very much as though the Emperor of Germany, having possessed himself of London, should obtain from Don Carlos a cession of the throne of Spain; or as though Napoleon should have got such a cession of the Papacy, in 1813, from Pius VII. Still it is insisted [Pg 69]upon strongly by the Hanefite divines as giving a more permanent dynastic title than either of the previous pleas. As a precedent for nomination they cite the act of Abu Bekr, who on his death-bed recommended Omar as his successor in the Caliphate.

4. The guardianship of the two shrines, that is to say of Mecca and Jerusalem, but especially of Mecca. It has been asserted by some of the Ulema, and it is certainly a common opinion at the present day, that the sovereignty of Hejaz is in itself sufficient title to the Caliphate. It seems certainly to have been so considered in the first age of Islam, and many a bloody war was then fought for the right of protecting the Beyt Allah; but the connection of Hejaz with the Empire of the Caliphs has been too often broken to make this a very tenable argument. In the tenth century it was held by the Karmathian heretics, in the thirteenth by the Imams of Sana, and for seven years in the present century by the Wahhabis. Still the de facto sovereignty of the Harameyn, or two shrines, was one of Selim's pleas; and it is one which has reappeared in modern arguments respecting the Caliphal rights of his descendants.

5. Possession of the Amanat or sacred relics. [Pg 70]This last was a plea addressed to the vulgar rather than to the learned; but it is one which cannot be passed by unnoticed here, for it exercises a powerful influence at the present day over the ignorant mass of Mussulmans. It was asserted, and is still a pious belief, that from the sack of Bagdad, in 1258, certain relics of the Prophet and his companions were saved and brought to Cairo, and thence transferred by Selim to Constantinople. These were represented to constitute the Imperial insignia of office, and their possession to give a title to the Caliphal succession. They consisted of the cloak of the Prophet borne by his soldiers as a standard, of some hairs from his beard, and of the sword of Omar. The vulgar believe them to be still preserved in the mosque of Ayub; and though the Ulema no longer insist on their authenticity, they are often referred to as an additional test of the Sultan's right.

Such, then, were the arguments of the Hanefite school, who defended Selim's claim, and such they are with regard to his successors of the house of Othman. By the world at large they seem to have been pretty generally accepted, the more so as the Turkish Sultans, having only a political end in view, were satisfied with their formal recognition [Pg 71]by their own subjects, and did not bring the question to an issue with their independent neighbours. Neither the Mogul Emperors at Delhi nor the Sheriffs of Morocco were called upon to acknowledge temporal or spiritual supremacy in the Ottoman Sultans, nor did these affect an every-day use of the ancient title they had assumed.

In India the head of the house of Othman was still known to Moslems as Padishah or Sultan er Roum, the Roman Emperor, the most powerful of Mussulman princes, but not in any special manner the head of their religion, certainly not their sovereign. The Ulema, indeed, such as were Hanefites, admitted him to be legally Khalifeh; but many of the Shafite school denied this, pleading still that as an alien to the Koreysh his claim was illegal, while to the ignorant mass of the people out of his dominions his spiritual title remained almost unknown. The Sultans themselves were doubtless to blame for this, seeing that the spiritual functions of their new office were left almost entirely unperformed. For it cannot be too strongly insisted on that the assumption of the Caliphate was to the house of Othman only a means to an end, viz. the consolidation of its worldly [Pg 72]power upon a recognized basis, and that, once that end obtained, the temporal dignity of Sultan was all that they really considered. Thus they never sought to exercise the right appertaining to the Caliphal office of appointing Naïbs, or Deputy Imams, in the lands outside their dominions, or to interfere with doctrinal matters at home, except where such might prejudice the interests of their rule. With regard to these, the theologians of Constantinople, having satisfactorily settled the Caliphal dispute, and pronounced the house of Othman for ever heirs to the dignity they had assumed, were recommended by the head of the State to busy themselves no further with doctrinal matters, and to consider the ijtahad, or development of new dogma, altogether closed for the future in their schools. Soliman the Magnificent, Selim's heir, especially insisted upon this. He had already promulgated a series of decrees affecting the civil administration of his empire, which he had declared to be immutable; and an immutability, too, in dogma he thought would still further secure the peace and stability of his rule. Nor did he meet with aught but approval here from the Hanefite divines.

The Turkish Ulema, ever since their first appear[Pg 73]ance in the Arabian schools in the eleventh century, finding themselves at a disadvantage through their ignorance of the sacred language, and being constitutionally adverse to intellectual effort, had maintained the proposition that mental repose was the true feature of orthodoxy, and in their fetwas had consistently relied on authority and rejected original argument. They therefore readily seconded the Sultan in his views. Argument on first principles was formally forbidden in the schools; and for the interpretation of existing law two offices were invented—the one for dogmatic, the other for practical decisions, those of the Sheykh el Islam and the Great Mufti. This closing of doctrinal inquiry by the Ottoman Sultans, and the removal of the seat of supreme spiritual government from the Arabian atmosphere of Cairo to the Tartar atmosphere of the Bosphorus, was the direct and immediate cause of the religious stagnation which Islam suffered from so conspicuously in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

We have now brought the history of the Caliphate down to the period described in the last chapter as one of intellectual torpor for Islam. It was a lethargy from which there seemed no [Pg 74]awakening, and which to contemporaries, Voltaire among the rest, seemed closely approximating to the death of unbelief. In spite of Soliman's eternal arrangements, the temporal power of the house of Othman was wofully diminished, and the spiritual prestige of the Sultans was gone with Mussulmans. By the middle of the last century the title of Caliph, even in their own dominions, was all but forgotten, and the Court of Constantinople was become a byword for its vice and infidelity. It can therefore be well imagined that the awakening of religious feeling, which I also described as having been produced by the Wahhabite movement, especially menaced the Sultan in his Caliphal pretensions. By the beginning of the present century the serious world of Islam was already ripening for a change, and the title of the Caliphate seemed open to whoever should re-invent and prove himself worthy to wear it. Two men certainly then dreamed of its acquisition, both men of supreme genius, and holding the elements of success in their hands. Nor can it be doubted that either of them would have achieved his ambition but for the appearance against them of a material power greater than their own, and which then, for the first time, began to make itself felt [Pg 75]as paramount in Asia. That power was England, and the ambitions she thwarted there were those of Bonaparte and Mehemet Ali.

It is not, I believe, sufficiently understood how vast a scheme was overthrown by the Battle of the Nile. Napoleon's mind was formed for dominion in the East, and where he failed in Europe he would have infallibly succeeded in Asia. There little policies are useless, and great ones root themselves in a congenial soil; and he was possessed with an idea which must have flourished. His English opponents, judging him only by the scale of their own thoughts, credited him with the inferior design of invading India through Persia, and called it a mad one; but India was, in fact, a small part only of his programme. When he publicly pronounced the Kelemat at Cairo, and professed the faith of Islam, he intended to be its Head, arguing rightly that what had been possible three hundred years before to Selim was possible also then to him. Nor would the Mussulman world have been much more astonished in 1799 at being asked to accept a Bonaparte for Caliph, than it was in 1519 at being asked to accept an Ottoman. With Napoleon's genius for war, and but for the disastrous sea fight on the Nile, all this might have [Pg 76]been, and more; and it is conceivable that Europe, taken in reverse by a great Moslem multitude, might have suffered worse disasters than any the actual Napoleonic wars procured her, while a more durable empire might have been founded on the Nile or Bosphorus than the Bonapartes were able to establish on the Seine. As it was, it was an episode and no more, useful only to the few who saw it near enough to admire and understand.[11]

Among these who saw and understood was Mehemet Ali, the Albanian adventurer, who undertook the government of Egypt when England restored it to the Porte. Bonaparte from the first was his model, and he inherited from him this vision of a new Caliphate, the greatest of the Napoleonic ideas, and worked persistently to realize it. He was within an ace of succeeding. In 1839 Mehemet Ali had Mecca, Cairo, and Jerusalem in his hands, and he had defeated the Sultan at Konia, and was advancing through Asia Minor on Constantinople. There, without doubt, he would have proclaimed himself Caliph, having all [Pg 77]the essential elements of the Sultan's admitted right on which to found a new claim.

Nor is it probable that he would have found much religious opposition to the realization of his scheme from the Turkish Ulema. These, already alarmed by Sultan Murad's administrative reforms, would hardly have espoused the Sultan's defence with any vigour; and though Mehemet Ali himself was open to a charge of latitudinarianism, he had the one great claim upon orthodox Islam of having delivered the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina from the Wahhabis. The house of Othman, indeed, at this time had begun to stink—not only in the nostrils of the outside world, but in that of the Hanefite school itself; and as these had formerly accepted Selim, so they might very well, in 1839, have accepted Mehemet Ali. But this attempt, too, was stopped by England in pursuance of a policy which it is difficult now not to regret. The too venturous Arnaout was sent back to his vice-royalty in Egypt, and the House of Othman was entrusted with a new lease of spiritual sovereignty, if not yet of spiritual power.

The reigns of Abd el Mejid and of Abd el Aziz are remarkable with Mussulmans as having witnessed a complete dissociation of interests between [Pg 78]the Imperial Government and the Old Hanefite school of Ulema. I have no space here to discuss the nature of the reforms attempted and partly effected in the Ottoman Empire between the years 1839 and 1869 as a concession to the clamour of Europe. They were instituted not by and through religion, as they should have been, but in defiance of it, and so failed to find acceptance anywhere with religious people. All changes so attempted must fail in Islam because they have in them the inevitable vice of illegality, and I hope to have an opportunity of explaining later the manner in which alone a true reform can hope to find acceptance. For the present I only note the promulgation of the Hatti Humayoum and its kindred decrees as points in the history of the Ottoman Caliphate's decline, and as direct reasons for the reactionary change of front which we now witness in the policy of Constantinople.

Abd el Mejid for his ill-judged attempts gained with Mussulmans the name of an unbeliever, and his son was deposed in the way we all know as a breaker of the religious law. For a moment, however, Abd el Aziz seems to have seen the true nature of his position and to have had some idea of the rôle required of him, as the following inci[Pg 79]dent will show. It marks at any rate the epoch pretty exactly when a revival of the Sultan's spiritual pretensions, as a settled policy, was first resolved on in Turkey. The circumstances have been narrated to me as follows:—

Quite in the early days of Abd el Aziz's reign a certain statesman, a man of original genius and profoundly versed in the knowledge both of Europe and of the East, and especially of the religious history of Islam, came to Constantinople. He was a friend of Rushdi Pasha, then the Grand Vizier, and of others of the party of Young Turkey, men who were seeking by every means, fair and foul, to reorganize and strengthen the central authority of the Empire. To these, and subsequently, in an interview, to the Sultan himself, he urged the advantage which might accrue to the Ottoman Government both as a means of controlling the provinces and as a weapon against European diplomacy if the spiritual authority of the Sultan as Caliph were put more prominently forward. He suggested especially to Abd el Aziz that his real strength lay in the reorganization not of his temporal but of his spiritual forces; and he expressed his wonder that so evident a source of strength had been so little drawn on. He pointed [Pg 80]out the importance of the Mussulman populations outside the Empire to the Sultan, and urged that these should be brought as much as possible within the sphere of Constantinople influence. The Barbary States, Mussulman India, and Central Asia might thus become to all intents and purposes, save that of tribute, subjects of the Porte.

In early times it had been a duty of the Caliphs to appoint in all the provinces of Islam Imams or deputies to represent their spiritual authority, and it was suggested that these should once more be appointed. An Imam, or leader of their public prayer, is a necessity with orthodox Mussulmans, and in default of legal appointment from the Caliph, who is himself the supreme Imam, the faithful had been constrained to apply either to the local governments for such appointment or to elect the functionary themselves. This they acknowledged to be illegal, and would willingly revert to the more legitimate system; while the re-establishment of such a hierarchy would bring an enormous accession of spiritual power to Constantinople. It was also shown to Abd el Aziz how all-important Arabia was to his position, and how greatly the means of influence there had been neglected.

[Pg 81]I am informed by one present at this interview that Abd el Aziz was not only delighted at the idea, but profoundly astonished. He seems to have had no notion previously either of the historical dignity of the spiritual office he held nor of its prerogatives, and for a while his thoughts were turned in the direction pointed out to him. He sent for the chief Ulema and asked them if all he heard was true; and, when he found their ideas to be entirely in unison with the advice just given him, he commissioned the Sheykh el Islam to push forward the doctrine of his spiritual leadership by all the means in his power. Missionaries were consequently despatched to every part of the Mussulman world, and especially to India and the Barbary States, to explain the Hanefite dogma of the Caliphate; and though at first these met with little success they eventually gained their object in those countries where believers were obliged to live under infidel rule, so much so that in a few years the Ottoman Caliphate became once more a recognized "question" in the schools. They were aided in this by a powerful instrument, then first employed in Turkey, the press.[12] A newspaper in Arabic called the Jawaib was sub[Pg 82]sidized at Constantinople under the direction of one Achmet Faris, a convert to Islam and a man of great literary ability and knowledge of Arabic, who already had views on the subject of the Caliphate; and this organ henceforth consistently advocated the new policy of the Ulema.

The official clique in Stamboul were, however, at that time still intent on other projects, and only half understood the part to be played by religion in their scheme of administrative reform for the Empire. Besides—and this was the chief hindrance to the Ulema—Abd el Aziz was not a man capable of seriously carrying out a great political idea, being little else than a man of pleasure. He and his government consequently soon drifted back into the groove of his predecessors' material policy, which relied for its strength on the physical force of arms, foreign loans, and the intrigues of officials. The only practical action taken by Ottoman ministers in the line indicated were the twin crusades proclaimed against the Wahhabis of Hasa and the heretical Imams of Sana. But the Hanefite Ulema were not thus to be satisfied. They had determined on carrying out the idea they had adopted, and on forcing the Sultan to put himself openly at the head [Pg 83]of a religious and reactionary movement; and when they found that Abd el Aziz could not be made to act consistently as Caliph, they deposed him, and thus opened a way for the true hero of their idea, the present Sultan, Abd el Hamid.

The advent of this latest scion of the house of Othman to the spiritual succession of the Prophet, though a godsend in appearance to religious Moslems, cannot but be regarded by all who wish Islam well as a very great misfortune. It is almost certain that if Abd el Mejid and Abd el Aziz had been succeeded by another of those senseless monarchs who have so often filled the Imperial throne, the Ottoman Caliphate would already have been a thing of the past, at least as regards the larger and more intelligent part of Islam. In the collapse of its physical power in 1879, the official camarilla of Constantinople would have been unable to control the movement of revolt against the spiritual and temporal sovereignty of the Sultan, and something would have taken its place offering a more possible foundation for true religious reform. Arabia would in all probability have by this time asserted its independence, and under a new Caliphate of the Koreysh would [Pg 84]have been attracting the sympathies and the adhesion of the Eastern world. There might have been schisms and religious convulsions, but at least there would have been life; and what Islam requires is to live. But unfortunately Abd el Hamid was neither a mere voluptuary nor an imbecile, and catching, by an instinct which one cannot but admire, the one rope of safety which remained for him and his house, he placed himself at the head of the extreme reactionary party of Islam, and thus put back for a while the hour of fate.

It is difficult to gain accurate information as to Abd el Hamid's character and religious opinions, but I believe it may be safely asserted that he represents in these latter the extremest Hanefite views. In youth he was, for a prince, a serious man, showing a taste for learning, especially for geography and history; and though not an alem he has some knowledge of his religion. It may therefore be taken for granted that he is sincere in his belief of his own spiritual position—it is easy to be sincere where one's interest lies in believing; and I have it from one who saw him at the time that on the day soon after his accession, when, according to the custom already mentioned, he received the sword at the mosque [Pg 85]of Ayub, he astonished his courtiers with the sudden change in his demeanour. All the afternoon of that day he talked to them of his spiritual rank in language which for centuries had not been heard in the precincts of the Seraglio. It is certain, too, that his first act, when delivered from the pressure of the Russian invasion, was to organize afresh the propagandism already begun, and to send out new missionaries to India and the Barbary States to preach the doctrine of his own Caliphal authority to the Moslems in partibus infidelium. His language, too, to strangers from external Islam was from the first that of a spiritual rather than a temporal prince, and with the European Ambassadors he has used this position consistently and most effectually.

It is no mean proof of Abd el Hamid's ability that he should have invented the Mussulman non possumus with which he has disconcerted our diplomacy. In private life he is said to be regular at his prayers, though it is also said that he conforms to the custom of Turkish Sultans in avoiding legal marriage. He is at the same time a liberal patron of dervishes, workers of miracles, and holy men. These he is at pains to seek out and receive honourably. In his ad[Pg 86]ministration he conforms, wherever he is himself the actor, strictly to the Sheriat, and on doubtful points consults al