The fact is, Islam does move.  A vast change has come upon Mohammedan thought since its last legal Mujtahed wrote his last legal opinion; and what was true of orthodox Islam fifty and even twenty years ago is no longer true now.  When Urquhart, the first exponent of Mohammedanism to Englishmen, began his writing, the Hanefite teaching of Constantinople had not begun to be questioned, and he was perfectly justified in citing it as the only rule recognized by the mass of the orthodox.  No such thing as a liberal religious party then existed anywhere, and those who broke the law in the name of political reform were breakers of the law and nothing more.  Every good man was their enemy, and if any spoke of liberty he was understood as meaning licence.  It was not even conceived then that the Sheriat might be legally remodelled.  Now, however, and especially within the last ten years, a large section of godly and legal-minded men have ranged themselves on the side of liberal opinion, and serious attempts have been made to reconcile a desire of improvement with unabated loyalty to Islam.

A true liberal party has thus been formed, which includes in its ranks not merely political intriguers of the type familiar to Europe in Midhat Pasha, but men of sincere piety, who would introduce moral as well as political reforms into the practice of Mohammedans.  These have it in their programme to make the practice of religion more austere while widening its basis, to free the intelligence of believers from scholastic trammels, and at the same time to enforce more strictly the higher moral law of the Koran, which has been so long and so strangely violated.  In this they stand in close resemblance to the “Reformers” of Christianity; and some of the circumstances which have given them birth are so analogous to those which Europe encountered in the fifteenth century that it is impossible not to draw in one’s own mind a parallel, leading to the conviction that Islam, too, will work out for itself a Reformation.

The two chief agents of religious reform in Europe were the misery of the poor and the general spread of knowledge.  It is difficult at this distance of time to conceive how abject was the general state of the European peasantry in the days of Louis XI. of France and Frederick III. of Germany.  The constant wars and almost as constant famines, the general insecurity of the conditions of life, the dependence of a vast majority of the poor on capricious patrons, the hideous growth of corruption and licentiousness in the ruling classes, and the impotence of the ruled to obtain justice, above all, the servile acquiescence of religion, which should have protected them, in the political illegalities daily witnessed—­all these things, stirring the hearts of men, caused them to cry out against the existing order of Church discipline, and inclined them to Reform.  On the other hand, as we all know, the invention of printing had caused men to read and the invention of the New World to