sh form of Mohammedanism will be perpetuated in
Central Africa. It is there, indeed, that Islam has the best certainty
of expansion and the fairest field for a propagation of its creed.
Statistics, if they could be obtained, would, I am convinced, show an
immense Mohammedan progress within the last hundred years among the
negro races, nor is this to be wondered at. Islam has so much to offer
to the children of Ham that it cannot fail to win them--so much more
than any form of Christianity or European progress can give.

The Christian missionary makes his way slowly in Africa. He has no true
brotherhood to offer the negro except in another life. He makes no
appeal to a present sense of dignity in the man he would convert. What
Christian missionary takes a negress to wife or sits with the negro
wholly as an equal at meat? Their relations remain at best those of
teacher with taught, master with servant, grown man with child. The
Mohammedan missionary from Morocco meanwhile stands on a different
footing. He says to the negro, "Come up and sit beside me. Give me your
daughter and take mine. All who pronounce the formula of Islam are equal
in this world and in the next." In becoming a Mussulman even a slave
acquires immediate dignity and the right to despise all men, whatever
their colour, who are not as himself. This is a bribe in the hand of the
preacher of the Koran, and one which has never appealed in vain to the
enslaved races of the world.[5] Central Africa then may be counted on as
the inheritance of Islam at no very distant day. It is already said to
count ten millions of Moslems.

The _Shafite_ school, the third of the four "orthodox sects," is the
most flourishing of all in point of numbers, and it has characteristics
which mark it out as the one best adapted to survive in the struggle
which is impending between the schools of religious thought in Islam.
The Shafites may be compared to our broad Church, though without its
immediate tendency to infidelity. With the Shafites there is a
disposition to widen rather than to narrow the area of theology. The
Hanefites and Malekites proclaim loudly that inquiry has been closed and
change is impossible, but the Shafites are inclined to seek a new
mujtahed who shall reconcile Islam with the modern conditions of the
world. They feel that there is something wrong in things as they are,
for Islam is no longer politically prosperous, and they would see it
united once more and re