The Future of Islam | Page 9

point at variance
with the mass of Sunites. They do not acknowledge the modern
Caliphate. Those therefore of the Sunites who have acknowledged the
Ottoman claim are at issue with the Moors. On all other points,
however, the Moors are Sunites of the Sunites.
From the Moor to the negro is but a step, though it is a 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