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 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 remained, 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
favour