Chinaman, and the American, with all of whom she may
have in turn to count. If she would not be strangled by these influences
she must use other arms than those of the flesh, and meet the
intellectual invasion of her frontiers with a corresponding
intelligence. Otherwise she has nothing to look forward to but a gradual
decay, spiritual as well as political. Her law must become little by
little a dead letter, her Caliphate an obsolete survival, and her creed
a mere opinion. Islam as a living and controlling moral force in the
world would then gradually cease.

In expressing my conviction that Islam is not thus destined yet awhile
to perish I believe that I am running counter to much high authority
among my countrymen. I know that it is a received opinion with those
best qualified to instruct the public that Islam is in its constitution
unamenable to change, and by consequence to progressive life, or even,
in the face of hostile elements, to prolonged life at all. Students of
the Sheriat have not inaptly compared the Koranic law to a dead man's
hand, rigid and cold, and only to be loosened when the hand itself shall
have been cut away. It has been asserted that the first rule of
Mohammedan thought has been that change was inadmissible, and
development of religious practice, either to right or left of the narrow
path of mediaeval scholasticism, absolutely precluded. I know this, and I
know, too, that a vast array of learned Mohammedan opinion can be cited
to prove this to be the case, and that very few of the modern Ulema of
any school of divinity would venture openly to impugn its truth. Nor
have I forgotten the repeated failure of attempts made in Turkey within
the last fifty years to gain religious assent to the various legal
innovations decreed by Sultan after Sultan in deference to the will of
Europe, nor the fate which has sometimes overtaken those who were the
advocates of change. I know, according to all rule written and spoken by
the orthodox, that Islam cannot move, and yet in spite of it I answer
with some confidence in the fashion of Galileo, "E pur si muove."

The fact is, Islam does move. A vast change has come upon Mohammedan
thought since its last legal Mujtahed wrote his last legal opinion; and
what was true of orthodox Islam fifty and even twenty years ago is no
longer true now. When Urquhart, the first exponent of Mohammedanism to
Englishmen, began his writing, the Hanefite teaching of Constantinople
ha