In yet another respect the canonists need the aid of the temporal rulers.  An alert police is counted by them amongst the indispensable means of securing purity of doctrine and life.  They count it to the credit of princes and governors that they enforced by violent measures seclusion and veiling of the women, abstinence from drinking, and that they punished by flogging the negligent with regard to fasting or attending public worship.  The political decay of Islam, the increasing number of Mohammedans under foreign rule, appears to them, therefore, doubly dangerous, as they have little faith in the proof of Islam’s spiritual goods against life in a freedom which to them means license.

They find that every political change, in these terrible times, is to the prejudice of Islam, one Moslim people after another losing its independent existence; and they regard it as equally dangerous that Moslim princes are induced to accommodate their policy and government to new international ideas of individual freedom, which threaten the very life of Islam.  They see the antagonism to all foreign ideas, formerly considered as a virtue by every true Moslim, daily losing ground, and they are filled with consternation by observing in their own ranks the contamination of modernist ideas.  The brilliant development of the system of Islam followed the establishment of its material power; so the rapid decline of that political power which we are witnessing makes the question urgent, whether Islam has a spiritual essence able to survive the fall of such a material support.  It is certainly not the canonists who will detect the kernel; “verily we are God’s and verily to Him do we return,” they cry in helpless amazement, and their consolation is in the old prayer:  “And lay not on us, O our Lord, that for which we have no strength, but blot out our sins and forgive us and have mercy upon us.  Thou art our Master; grant us then to conquer the Unbelievers!”

IV

ISLAM AND MODERN THOUGHT

One of the most powerful factors of religious life in its higher forms is the need of man to find in this world of changing things an imperishable essence, to separate the eternal from the temporal and then to attach himself to the former.  Where the possibility of this operation is despaired of, there may arise a pessimism, which finds no path of liberation from the painful vicissitudes of life other than the annihilation of individuality.  A firm belief in a sphere of life freed from the category of time, together with the conviction that the poetic images of that superior world current among mankind are images and nothing else, is likely to give rise to definitions of the Absolute by purely negative attributes and to mental efforts having for their object the absorption of individual existence in the indescribable infinite.  Generally speaking, a high development of intellectual life, especially an intimate acquaintance with different religious systems, is not favourable to the continuance of elaborate conceptions of things eternal; it will rather increase the tendency to deprive the idea of the Transcendent of all colour and definiteness.