The Future of Islam | Page 3

as I think, be doubted by any who have mingled much in
the last few years with the Mussulman populations of Western Asia.
There it is easily discernible that great changes are impending, changes
perhaps analogous to those which Christendom underwent four
hundred years ago, and that a new departure is urgently demanded of
England if she would maintain even for a few years her position as the
guide and arbiter of Asiatic progress.
It was not altogether without the design of gaining more accurate
knowledge than I could find elsewhere on the subject of this
Mohammedan revival that I visited Jeddah in the early part of the past
winter, and that I subsequently spent some months in Egypt and Syria
in the almost exclusive society of Mussulmans. Jeddah, I argued, the
seaport of Mecca and only forty miles distant from that famous centre
of the Moslem universe, would be the most convenient spot from which
I could obtain such a bird's-eye view of Islam as I was in search of; and
I imagined rightly that I should there find myself in an atmosphere less
provincial than that of Cairo, or Bagdad, or Constantinople.

Jeddah is indeed in the pilgrim season the suburb of a great metropolis,
and even a European stranger there feels that he is no longer in a world
of little thoughts and local aspirations. On every side the politics he
hears discussed are those of the great world, and the religion professed
is that of a wider Islam than he has been accustomed to in Turkey or in
India. There every race and language are represented, and every sect.
Indians, Persians, Moors, are there,--negroes from the Niger, Malays
from Java, Tartars from the Khanates, Arabs from the French Sahara,
from Oman and Zanzibar, even, in Chinese dress and undistinguishable
from other natives of the Celestial Empire, Mussulmans from the
interior of China. As one meets these walking in the streets, one's view
of Islam becomes suddenly enlarged, and one finds oneself exclaiming
with Sir Thomas Browne, "Truly the (Mussulman) world is greater than
that part of it geographers have described." The permanent population,
too, of Jeddah is a microcosm of Islam. It is made up of individuals
from every nation under heaven. Besides the indigenous Arab, who has
given his language and his tone of thought to the rest, there is a mixed
resident multitude descended from the countless pilgrims who have
remained to live and die in the holy cities. These preserve, to a certain
extent, their individuality, at least for a generation or two, and maintain
a connection with the lands to which they owe their origin and the
people who were their countrymen. Thus there is constantly found at
Jeddah a free mart of intelligence for all that is happening in the world;
and the common gossip of the bazaar retails news from every corner of
the Mussulman earth. It is hardly too much to say that one can learn
more of modern Islam in a week at Jeddah than in a year elsewhere, for
there the very shopkeepers discourse of things divine, and even the
Frank Vice-Consuls prophesy. The Hejazi is less shy, too, of discussing
religious matters than his fellow Mussulmans are in other places.
Religion is, as it were, part of his stock-in-trade, and he is accustomed
to parade it before strangers. With a European he may do this a little
disdainfully, but still he will do it, and with less disguise or desire to
please than is in most places the case. Moreover--and this is
important--it is almost always the practical side of questions that the
commercial Jeddan will put forward. He sees things from a political
and economical point of view, rather than a doctrinal, and if fanatical,
he is so from the same motives, and no others, which once moved the

citizens of Ephesus to defend the worship of their shrines.
In other cities, Cairo and Constantinople excepted, the Ulema, or
learned men, of whom a stranger might seek instruction, would be
found busying themselves mainly with doctrinal matters not always
interesting at the present day, old-world arguments of Koranic
interpretation which have from time immemorial occupied the schools.
But here even these are treated practically, and as they bear on the
political aspect of the hour. For myself, I became speedily impressed
with the advantage thus afforded me, and neglected no opportunity
which offered itself for listening and asking questions, so that without
pretending to the possession of more special skill than any intelligent
inquirer might command, I obtained a mass of information I cannot but
think to be of great value--while this in its turn served me later as an
introduction to such Mussulman divines as I afterwards met in the
North. Jeddah then realized all my