The Future of Islam | Page 9

step of race, perhaps of species. The political and religious connection of Morocco with the Soudan is a very close one, and, whatever may be the future of the Mediterranean provinces fronting the Spanish coast, it cannot be doubted that the Moorish 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 reorganized even at the expense of some dogmatic concessions. I know that many even of the Shafites themselves will deny this, for no Mussulman will willingly acknowledge that he is an advocate of change; but it is unquestionable that among members of their school such ideas are more frequently found than with the others.
Among the Shafites, too, ideas of a moral reformation find a footing, and they speak more openly than the rest their suspicion that the house of Othman, with its fornications and its bestialities and contempt of justice, has been the ruin of Islam. Arabian custom is the basis of its ideas upon this head, for most Arabs out of Africa if anything are Shafites; and it is the school of the virtuous poor rather than of the licentious rich. It is more humane in its bearing towards Jews and Christians, finding a common ground with them in the worship of the one true God, the moral law propounded at various times to man, and the natural distinction between right and wrong. I may exaggerate this, perhaps, but something of it certainly exists, and it is a feeling that is growing.
Shafism has its stronghold at Cairo, where the Sheykh el Islam has always belonged to this rite, but it is also the prevailing school in Asia wherever Mohammedanism has been introduced through the instrumentality of Arabian missionaries. In India the mass of the Mussulman population is Shafite, especially in Hyderabad and the Bombay Presidency, where the Arab element is strongest, while Hanefism is the school of the great people who derive their origin from the Mogul conquests, and of many of the Ulema who are in the habit of making their religious education complete in the Hanefite schools of Bokhara. Wahhabism, too, in the present century has taken great hold of the poorer classes, and within the last few years a Turkish propaganda has been at work among them with some