nd one stark affirmation--living or dying, one only--and
where men have repeated that in red-hot belief through centuries, the
air still shakes to it.

Some say now that Islam is dying and that nobody cares; others that, if
she withers in Europe and Asia, she will renew herself in Africa and
will return--terrible--after certain years, at the head of all the nine
sons of Ham; others dream that the English understand Islam as no one
else does, and, in years to be, Islam will admit this and the world will
be changed. If you go to the mosque Al Azhar--the thousand-year-old
University of Cairo--you will be able to decide for yourself. There is
nothing to see except many courts, cool in hot weather, surrounded by
cliff-like brick walls. Men come and go through dark doorways, giving on
to yet darker cloisters, as freely as though the place was a bazaar.
There are no aggressive educational appliances. The students sit on the
ground, and their teachers instruct them, mostly by word of mouth, in
grammar, syntax, logic; _al-hisab_, which is arithmetic; _al-jab'r w'al
muqabalah_, which is algebra; _at-tafsir,_ commentaries on the Koran,
and last and most troublesome, _al-ahadis,_ traditions, and yet more
commentaries on the law of Islam, which leads back, like everything, to
the Koran once again. (For it is written, 'Truly the Quran is none other
than a revelation.') It is a very comprehensive curriculum. No man can
master it entirely, but any can stay there as long as he pleases. The
university provides commons--twenty-five thousand loaves a day, I
believe,--and there is always a place to lie down in for such as do not
desire a shut room and a bed. Nothing could be more simple or, given
certain conditions, more effective. Close upon six hundred professors,
who represent officially or unofficially every school or thought, teach
ten or twelve thousand students, who draw from every Mohammedan
community, west and east between Manila and Morocco, north and south
between Kamchatka and the Malay mosque at Cape Town. These drift off to
become teachers of little schools, preachers at mosques, students of the
Law known to millions (but rarely to Europeans), dreamers, devotees, or
miracle-workers in all the ends of the earth. The man who interested me
most was a red-bearded, sunk-eyed mullah from the Indian frontier, not
likely to be last at any distribution of food, who stood up like a lean
wolfhound among collies in a little assembly at a d