The reigns of Abd el Mejid and of Abd el Aziz are remarkable with Mussulmans as having witnessed a complete dissociation of interests between the Imperial Government and the Old Hanefite school of Ulema.  I have no space here to discuss the nature of the reforms attempted and partly effected in the Ottoman Empire between the years 1839 and 1869 as a concession to the clamour of Europe.  They were instituted not by and through religion, as they should have been, but in defiance of it, and so failed to find acceptance anywhere with religious people.  All changes so attempted must fail in Islam because they have in them the inevitable vice of illegality, and I hope to have an opportunity of explaining later the manner in which alone a true reform can hope to find acceptance.  For the present I only note the promulgation of the Hatti Humayoum and its kindred decrees as points in the history of the Ottoman Caliphate’s decline, and as direct reasons for the reactionary change of front which we now witness in the policy of Constantinople.

Abd el Mejid for his ill-judged attempts gained with Mussulmans the name of an unbeliever, and his son was deposed in the way we all know as a breaker of the religious law.  For a moment, however, Abd el Aziz seems to have seen the true nature of his position and to have had some idea of the role required of him, as the following incident will show.  It marks at any rate the epoch pretty exactly when a revival of the Sultan’s spiritual pretensions, as a settled policy, was first resolved on in Turkey.  The circumstances have been narrated to me as follows:—­

Quite in the early days of Abd el Aziz’s reign a certain statesman, a man of original genius and profoundly versed in the knowledge both of Europe and of the East, and especially of the religious history of Islam, came to Constantinople.  He was a friend of Rushdi Pasha, then the Grand Vizier, and of others of the party of Young Turkey, men who were seeking by every means, fair and foul, to reorganize and strengthen the central authority of the Empire.  To these, and subsequently, in an interview, to the Sultan himself, he urged the advantage which might accrue to the Ottoman Government both as a means of controlling the provinces and as a weapon against European diplomacy if the spiritual authority of the Sultan as Caliph were put more prominently forward.  He suggested especially to Abd el Aziz that his real strength lay in the reorganization not of his temporal but of his spiritual forces; and he expressed his wonder that so evident a source of strength had been so little drawn on.  He pointed out the importance of the Mussulman populations outside the Empire to the Sultan, and urged that these should be brought as much as possible within the sphere of Constantinople influence.  The Barbary States, Mussulman India, and Central Asia might thus become to all intents and purposes, save that of tribute, subjects of the Porte.