must remember that every man possessed
of a firm conviction of any kind is more or less a missionary; and the
belief in the possibility of winning souls by violence has many adherents
everywhere. One of my friends among the young-Turkish state officials,
who wished to persuade me of the perfect religious tolerance of Turkey of
today, concluded his argument by the following reflection: "Formerly men
used to behead each other for difference of opinion about the Hereafter.
Nowadays, praise be to Allah, we are permitted to believe what we like; but
people continue to kill each other for political or social dissension. That
is most pitiful indeed; for the weapons in use being more terrible and more
costly than before, mankind lacks the peace necessary to enjoy the liberty
of conscience it has acquired."

The truthful irony of these words need not prevent us from considering the
independence of spiritual life and the liberation of its development from
material compulsion as one of the greatest blessings of our civilization.
We feel urged by missionary zeal of the better kind to make the Mohammedan
world partake in its enjoyment. In the Turkish Empire, in Egypt, in many
Mohammedan countries under Western control, the progressive elements of
Moslim society spontaneously meet us half-way. But behind them are the
millions who firmly adhere to the old superstition and are supported by
the canonists, those faithful guardians of what the infallible Community
declared almost one thousand years ago to be the doctrine and rule of life
for all centuries to come. Will it ever prove possible to move in one
direction a body composed of such different elements, or will this body be
torn in pieces when the movement has become irresistible?

We have more than once pointed to the catholic character of orthodox Islam.
In fact, the diversity of spiritual tendencies is not less in the Moslim
world than within the sphere of Christian influence; but in Islam, apart
from the political schisms of the first centuries, that diversity has not
given rise to anything like the division of Christianity into sects. There
is a prophetic saying, related by Tradition, which later generations have
generally misunderstood to mean that the Mohammedan community would be
split into seventy-three different sects. Moslim heresiologists have been
induced by this prediction to fill up their lists of seventy-three numbers
with all sorts of names, many of which represent