The Turkish Ulema, ever since their first appearance in the Arabian schools in the eleventh century, finding themselves at a disadvantage through their ignorance of the sacred language, and being constitutionally adverse to intellectual effort, had maintained the proposition that mental repose was the true feature of orthodoxy, and in their fetwas had consistently relied on authority and rejected original argument.  They therefore readily seconded the Sultan in his views.  Argument on first principles was formally forbidden in the schools; and for the interpretation of existing law two offices were invented—­the one for dogmatic, the other for practical decisions, those of the Sheykh el Islam and the Great Mufti.  This closing of doctrinal inquiry by the Ottoman Sultans, and the removal of the seat of supreme spiritual government from the Arabian atmosphere of Cairo to the Tartar atmosphere of the Bosphorus, was the direct and immediate cause of the religious stagnation which Islam suffered from so conspicuously in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

We have now brought the history of the Caliphate down to the period described in the last chapter as one of intellectual torpor for Islam.  It was a lethargy from which there seemed no awakening, and which to contemporaries, Voltaire among the rest, seemed closely approximating to the death of unbelief.  In spite of Soliman’s eternal arrangements, the temporal power of the house of Othman was wofully diminished, and the spiritual prestige of the Sultans was gone with Mussulmans.  By the middle of the last century the title of Caliph, even in their own dominions, was all but forgotten, and the Court of Constantinople was become a byword for its vice and infidelity.  It can therefore be well imagined that the awakening of religious feeling, which I also described as having been produced by the Wahhabite movement, especially menaced the Sultan in his Caliphal pretensions.  By the beginning of the present century the serious world of Islam was already ripening for a change, and the title of the Caliphate seemed open to whoever should re-invent and prove himself worthy to wear it.  Two men certainly then dreamed of its acquisition, both men of supreme genius, and holding the elements of success in their hands.  Nor can it be doubted that either of them would have achieved his ambition but for the appearance against them of a material power greater than their own, and which then, for the first time, began to make itself felt as paramount in Asia.  That power was England, and the ambitions she thwarted there were those of Bonaparte and Mehemet Ali.