The Future of Islam | Page 4

hopes and gratified nearly all my
curiosities. I will own, too, to having come away with more than a
gratified curiosity, and to having found new worlds of thought and life
in an atmosphere I had fancied to be only of decay. I was astonished at
the vigorous life of Islam, at its practical hopes and fears in this modern
nineteenth century, and above all at its reality as a moral force; so that
if I had not exactly come to scoff, I certainly remained, in a certain
sense, to pray. At least I left it interested, as I had never thought to be,
in the great struggle which seemed to me impending between the
parties of reaction in Islam and reform, and not a little hopeful as to its
favourable issue. What this is likely to be I now intend to discuss.
First, however, it will I think be as well to survey briefly the actual
composition of the Mohammedan world. It is only by a knowledge of
the elements of which Islam is made up that we can guess its future,
and these are less generally known than they should be. A stranger
from Europe visiting the Hejaz is, as I have said, irresistibly struck with
the vastness of the religious world in whose centre he stands.
Mohammedanism to our Western eyes seems almost bounded by the
limits of the Ottoman Empire. The Turk stands in our foreground, and
has stood there from the days of Bajazet, and in our vulgar tongue his
name is still synonymous with Moslem, so that we are apt to look upon

him as, if not the only, at least the chief figure of Islam. But from
Arabia we see things in a truer perspective, and become aware that
beyond and without the Ottoman dominions there are races and nations,
no less truly followers of the Prophet, beside whom the Turk shrinks
into numerical insignificance. We catch sight, it may be for the first
time in their real proportions, of the old Persian and Mogul monarchies,
of the forty million Mussulmans of India, of the thirty million Malays,
of the fifteen million Chinese, and the vast and yet uncounted
Mohammedan populations of Central Africa. We see, too, how
important is still the Arabian element, and how necessary it is to count
with it, in any estimate we may form of Islam's possible future. Turkey,
meanwhile, and Constantinople, retire to a rather remote horizon, and
the Mussulman centre of gravity is as it were shifted from the north and
west towards the south and east.
I was at some pains while at Jeddah to gain accurate statistics of the
Haj according to the various races and sects composing it, and with
them of the populations they in some measure represent. The
pilgrimage is of course no certain guide as to the composition of the
Mussulman world, for many accidents of distance and political
circumstance interfere with calculations based on it. Still to a certain
extent a proportion is preserved between it and the populations which
supply it; and in default of better, statistics of the Haj afford us an
index not without value of the degree of religious vitality existing in the
various Mussulman countries. My figures, which for convenience I
have arranged in tabular form, are taken principally from an official
record, kept for some years past at Jeddah, of the pilgrims landed at that
port, and checked as far as European subjects are concerned by
reference to the consular agents residing there. They may therefore be
relied upon as fairly accurate; while for the land pilgrimage I trust in
part my own observations, made three years ago, in part statistics
obtained at Cairo and Damascus. For the table of population in the
various lands of Islam I am obliged to go more directly to European
sources of information. As may be supposed, no statistics on this point
of any value were obtainable at Jeddah; but by taking the figures
commonly given in our handbooks, and supplementing and correcting
these by reference to such persons as I could find who knew the

countries, I have, I hope, arrived at an approximation to the truth, near
enough to give a tolerable idea to general readers of the numerical
proportions of Islam. Strict accuracy, however, I do not here pretend to,
nor would it if obtainable materially help my present argument.
The following is my table:--
TABLE OF THE MECCA PILGRIMAGE OF 1880.
| | | Total of Nationality of Pilgrims. |Arriving|Arriving| Mussulman |by
Sea. |by Land.| population | | | represented.
-----------------------------------------+--------+--------+------------ Ottoman
subjects including pilgrims from | | | Syria and Irak, but not from Egypt
or | | | Arabia proper | 8,500 | 1,000 | 22,000,000 | | | Egyptians | 5,000 |