ay and he does
marry within the prohibited degrees."--_Islam under the Arabs_, by R.D.
Osborn, London 1876, p. 91.]

[Footnote 146: Studies in a Mosque, by S.L. Poole, pp. 77 and 80,
London, 1880.]

[Sidenote: Finality of the social reforms of Mohammad.]

[Sidenote: Positive precepts.]

[Sidenote: Ceremonial law.]

[Sidenote: Concrete morals of the Koran.]

[Sidenote: Want of adaptibility of the Koran to surrounding
circumstances.]

37. It has been said with much stress regarding the teachings of
Mohammad: (1) That although under the degraded condition of Arabia, they
were a gift of great value, and succeeded in banishing those fierce
vices which naturally accompany ignorance and barbarism, but an
imperfect code of ethics has been made a permanent standard of good and
evil, and a final and irrevocable law, which is an insuperable barrier
to the regeneration and progress of a nation. It has been also urged
that his reforms were good and useful for his own time and place, but
that by making them final he has prevented further progress and
consecrated half measures. What were restrictions to his Arabs would
have been license to other men.[147] (2) That Islam deals with positive
precepts rather than with principles,[148] and the danger of a precise
system of positive precepts regulating the minute detail, the ceremonial
worship, and the moral and social relations of life, is, that it should
retain too tight a grip upon men when the circumstances which justified
it have changed and vanished away, and therefore the imposition of a
system good for barbarians upon people already possessing higher sort of
civilization and the principles of a purer faith is not a blessing but a
curse. Nay more, even the system which was good for people when they
were in a barbarous state may become positively mischievous to those
same people when they begin to emerge from their barbarism under its
influence into a higher condition.[149] (3) That the exact ritual and
formal observations of Islam have carried with them their own Nemesis,
and thus we find that in the worship of the faithful formalism and
indifferences, pedantic scrupulosity and positive disbelief flourish
side by side. The minutest change of posture in prayer, the displacement
of a simple genuflexion, would call for much heavier censure than
outward profligacy or absolute neglect.[150] (4) That morality is viewed
not in the abstract, but in the concrete. That the Koran de