The Caliph of the future, in whatever city he may fix his abode, will be chiefly a spiritual and not a temporal king, and will be limited in the exercise of his authority by few conditions of the existing material kind.  He will be spared the burden of despotic government, the odium of tax-gathering and conscription over unwilling populations, the constant struggle to maintain his authority in arms, and the as constant intrigue against rival Mohammedan princes.  It is probable that all these would readily acknowledge the nominal sovereignty of a Caliph who could not pretend to coerce them physically, and that the spiritual allegiance of orthodox believers everywhere would accrue to him as other Mohammedan sovereignty relaxed its hold.  Thus the dream of what is called Pan-islamism may yet be fulfilled, though in another form from that in which it is now presented to the faithful by Abd el Hamid and the Ulema of Constantinople.

That Islam in this spiritual form may achieve more notable triumphs than by arms in Eastern and Southern Asia we may well believe, and even that it may establish itself one day as the prevailing religion of the Continent.  Its moral advance within recent times in the Malay Archipelago, in China, in Tartary, and in India, encourages the supposition that under alien rule Mohammedanism will be able to hold its own, and more than own, against all rivals, and that in the decay of Buddhism it, and not Christianity, will be the form under which God will eventually be worshipped in the Tropics.  Its progress among the Malays under Dutch rule is certainly an astonishing phenomenon, and, taken in connection with a hardly less remarkable progress in Equatorial Africa, may well console those Mussulmans who see in the loss of their temporal dominions northwards signs of the decay of Islam.  Could such a reformation as was suggested in my last chapter be indeed effected, the vigour of conversion would doubtless be redoubled, independently of any condition of political prosperity in the ancient seats of Mohammedan dominion.  I do not, therefore, see in territorial losses a sign of Islam’s ruin as a moral and intellectual force in the world.

It is time, however, to consider the special part destined to be played by England in the drama of the Mussulman future.  England, if I understand her history rightly, stands towards Islam in a position quite apart from that of the rest of the European States.  These I have described as continuing a tradition of aggression inherited from the Crusades, and from the bitter wars waged by the Latin and Greek Empires against the growing power of the Ottoman Turks.  In the latter England took no part, her religious schism having already separated her from the general interests of Catholic Europe, while she had withdrawn from the former in the still honourable stage of the adventure, and consequently remained with no humiliating memories to avenge.  She came, therefore, into her modern relations with Mohammedans unprejudiced against them, and able to treat their religious and political opinions in a humane and liberal spirit, seeking of them practical advantages of trade rather than conquest.  Nor has the special nature of her position towards them been unappreciated by Mohammedans.