Not only in Egypt,—­in Oman and Peninsular Arabia, generally there is a real feeling of cordiality between the Mohammedan and his Christian “guest.”  The abolition of slavery in Zanzibar was a concession to European opinion at least as much as to European force; and a moral sympathy is acknowledged between a Moslem and a Christian State which has its base in a common sense of right and justice.  I have good reason to believe that, were the people of Yemen to effect their deliverance from Constantinople, the same humane feeling would be found to exist among them; and I know that it exists in Nejd; while even in Hejaz, which is commonly looked upon as the hot-bed of religious intolerance, I found all that was truly Arabian in the population as truly liberal.  Under the late Grand Sherif, Abd el Hamid’s reputed victim, these ideas were rapidly gaining ground; and had it not been for his untimely end, I have high authority for stating that the Mohammedan Holy Land would now be open to European intercourse, and slavery, or at least the slave trade, be there abolished.

There is, therefore, some reason to hope that, were Arabian thought once more supreme in Islam, its tendency would be in the direction of a wider and more liberal reading of the law, and that in time a true reconciliation might be effected with Christendom, perhaps with Christianity.  The great difficulty which, as things now stand, besets reform is this:  the Sheriat, or written code of law, still stands in orthodox Islam as an unimpeachable authority.  The law in itself is an excellent law, and as such commends itself to the loyalty of honest and God-fearing men; but on certain points it is irreconcilable with the modern needs of Islam, and it cannot legally be altered.

When it was framed it was not suspected that Mohammedans would ever be subjects of a Christian power, or that the Mohammedan State would ever need to accommodate itself to Christian demands in its internal policy.  It contemplated, too, mainly a state of war, and it accepted slavery and concubinage as war’s natural concomitants.  It did not understand that some day Islam would have to live at peace with its neighbours, if it would live at all, or that the general moral sense of the world would be brought to bear upon it with such force that the higher instincts of Moslems themselves should feel the necessity of restricting its old and rather barbarous licence as to marriage and divorce.  Yet these things have come to pass, or are rapidly coming; and the best thinkers in Islam now admit that changes in the direction indicated must sooner or later be made.  Only they insist that these should be legally effected, not forced on them by an overriding of the law.