Unfortunately, about the eleventh century of our era, a new and unfortunate influence began to make itself felt in the counsels of the Arabian Ulema, which little by little gaining ground, succeeded at last in stopping the flow of intellectual progress at the fountain head.  The Tartar, who then first makes his appearance in Mohammedan politics, though strong in arms, was slow to understand.  He had no habit of thought, and, having embraced Islam, he saw no necessity for further argument concerning it.  The language of the Koran and the traditions was a science sealed to him; and the reasoning intelligence of the Arab whose dominion he had invaded was a constant reproof to him.  He dared not venture his barbarian dignity in the war of wit which occupied the schools; and so fortified his unintelligence behind a rampart of dogmatic faith.  Impotent to develop law himself, he clutched blindly at that which he found written to his hand.  The code of Abu Hanifeh seemed to him a perfect thing, and he made it the resting place of his legal reason.  Then, as he gradually possessed himself of all authority, he declared further learning profane, and virtually closed the schools.  His military triumphs in the sixteenth century sealed the intellectual fate of Islam, and from that day to our own no light of discussion has illumined Moslem thought, in any of the old centres of her intelligence.  Reason, the eye of her faith in early times, has been fast shut—­by many, it has been argued, blind.

It is only in the present generation, and in the face of those dangers and misfortunes to which Islam finds herself exposed, that recourse has once more been had to intellectual methods; and it is precisely in those regions of Islam where Arab thought is strongest that we now find the surest symptoms of returning mental life.  Modern Arabia, wherever she has come in contact with what we call the civilization of the world, has shown herself ready and able to look it in the face; and she is now setting herself seriously to solve the problem of her own position and that of her creed towards it.

In North Africa, indeed, civilization for the moment presents itself to her only as an enemy; but where her intelligence has remained unclouded by the sense of political wrong she has proved herself capable, not only of understanding the better thought of Europe, but of sympathizing with it as akin to her own.  Thus at Cairo, now that the influence of Constantinople has been partially removed, we find the Arabian Ulema rapidly assimilating to their own the higher principles of our European thought, and engrafting on their lax moral practice some of the better features of our morality.  It is at no sacrifice of imagined dignity, as with the Turks, that Egypt is seeking a legal means for universal religious toleration, or from any pressure but that of their own intelligence that her chief people are beginning to reform their domestic life, and even, in some instances, to adopt the practice of monogamy.  The truth would seem to be that the same process is being effected to-day in their minds as was formerly the case with their ancestors.  In the eighth century, the Arabs, brought into contact with Greek philosophy, assimilated it by a natural process of their reasoning into the body of their own beliefs; and now in the nineteenth they are assimilating a foreign morality into their own system of morals.