able to stop now and then the progress of modernism or similar deviations from the trodden path with an imperative “Halt!” There is no lack indeed of mutual accusation of heresy; but this remains without serious consequences because of the absence of a high ecclesiastical council competent to decide once for all.  The political authorities, who might be induced by fanatical theologians to settle disputes by violent inquisitorial means, have been prevented for a long time from such interference by more pressing affairs.

A knowledge alone of the orthodox system of Islam, however complete, would give us an even more inadequate idea of the actual world of catholic Islam than the notion we should acquire of the spiritual currents moving the Roman Catholic world by merely studying the dogma and the canonical law of the Church of Rome.

Nevertheless, the unity of Islamic thought is by no means a word void of sense.  The ideas of Mohammedan philosophers, borrowed for a great part from Neoplatonism, the pantheism and the emanation theory of Mohammedan mystics are certainly still further distant from the simplicity of Qoranic religion than the orthodox dogmatics; but all those conceptions alike show indubitable marks of having grown up on Mohammedan soil.  In the works even of those mystics who efface the limits between things human and divine, who put Judaism, Christianity, and Paganism on the same line with the revelation of Mohammed, and who are therefore duly anathematized by the whole orthodox world, almost every page testifies to the relation of the ideas enounced with Mohammedan civilization.  Most of the treatises on science, arts, or law written by Egyptian students for their doctor’s degree at European universities make no exception to this rule; the manner in which these authors conceive the problems and strive for their solution is, in a certain sense, in the broadest sense of course, Mohammedan.  Thus, if we speak of Mohammedan thought, civilization, spirit, we have to bear in mind the great importance of the system which, almost unchanged, has been delivered for about one thousand years by one generation of doctors of Islam to the other, although it has become ever more unfit to meet the needs of the Community, on whose infallible Agreement it rests.  But, at the same time, we ought to consider that beside the agreement of canonists, of dogmatists, and of mystics, there are a dozen more agreements, social, political, popular, philosophical, and so on, and that however great may be the influence of the doctors, who pretend to monopolize infallibility for the opinions on which they agree, the real Agreement of Islam is the least common measure of all the agreements of the groups which make up the Community.

It would require a large volume to review the principal currents of thought pervading the Moslim world in our day; but a general notion may be acquired by a rapid glance at two centres, geographically not far distant from each other, but situated at the opposite poles of spiritual life:  Mecca and Cairo.