able 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 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
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 som