nothing but individual
opinions of more or less famous scholars on subordinate points of doctrine
or law. Almost ninety-five per cent. of all Mohammedans are indeed bound
together by a spiritual unity that may be compared with that of the Roman
Catholic Church, within whose walls there is also room for religious and
intellectual life of very different origin and tendency. In the sense of
broadness, Islam has this advantage, that there is no generally recognized
palpable authority able to stop now and then the progress of modernism or
similar deviations from the trodden path with an imperative "Halt!" There
is no lack indeed of mutual accusation of heresy; but this remains without
serious consequences because of the absence of a high ecclesiastical
council competent to decide once for all. The political authorities, who
might be induced by fanatical theologians to settle disputes by violent
inquisitorial means, have been prevented for a long time from such
interference by more pressing affairs.

A knowledge alone of the orthodox system of Islam, however complete, would
give us an even more inadequate idea of the actual world of catholic Islam
than the notion we should acquire of the spiritual currents moving the
Roman Catholic world by merely studying the dogma and the canonical law of
the Church of Rome.

Nevertheless, the unity of Islamic thought is by no means a word void of
sense. The ideas of Mohammedan philosophers, borrowed for a great part from
Neoplatonism, the pantheism and the emanation theory of Mohammedan mystics
are certainly still further distant from the simplicity of Qoranic
religion than the orthodox dogmatics; but all those conceptions alike show
indubitable marks of having grown up on Mohammedan soil. In the works even
of those mystics who efface the limits between things human and divine,
who put Judaism, Christianity, and Paganism on the same line with the
revelation of Mohammed, and who are therefore duly anathematized by the
whole orthodox world, almost every page testifies to the relation of the
ideas enounced with Mohammedan civilization. Most of the treatises on
science, arts, or law written by Egyptian students for their doctor's
degree at European universities make no exception to this rule; the manner
in which these authors conceive the problems and strive for their solution
is, in a certain sense, in the broadest sense of course, Mohammedan. Thus,
if we speak of Mohammedan thought, civiliza