which irradiated Arab rule in Spain and Sicily. And he gives the explanation of the fact when he adds that "Arabia seems satisfied to be the inviolable asylum of the Musulman faith. Mecca and Medina continue to be holy cities, and to this day the unbelievers are under the ban of exclusion from that sacred soil." In other words, the Arab's capacity for civilization increases as he recedes from the heart of Islam. In Spain, in Sogdiana, in Hindustan, the virus circulated at a distance from its source, and mingled with a variety of counteracting influences which served to keep it in check for a longer or shorter time according to the character of its environment. But the canker was there, and there could be but one issue: it must eventually destroy, or be destroyed by, the civilization on which it fastened. Islam is thus at the best ever The little pitted speck in garner'd fruit That, rotting inward, slowly moulders all. My quotations have all been from writers more or less friendly to Islam, at least so far as to present fairly all that can be said for it. Two or three of them indeed - Amari and Saint-Hilaire, and in a less degree Mr. Johnson-appear to me to be somewhat more than just to Mahomed and his system. And if that remark is not strictly applicable to the late G. H. Lewes, certainly no one will suspect him of depreciating Islam in the service of Christianity. I quote him therefore as possessing "the requisite indifference" for delivering an impartial judgment: The Arabs, though they conquered Spain [they never conquered the whole of it] were too weak in numbers to hold that country otherwise than by politic concessions. Prescott tells us, in his "Ferdinand and Isabella," that "the ambassadors of James II. of Aragon represented to the sovereign pontiff, Clement V., that of the two hundred thousand souls which then composed the population of Granada there were not more than five hundred of pure Moorish descent." Prescott thinks this estimate "extravagant;" but the renegades from Christianity and their offspring (many of whom were crypto-Christians) undoubtedly formed a large majority of the Musulman population, and in their ranks were some of the most cultivated minds in Spain. The Moorish civilization of Spain is, in brief, due (1) to the paucity of the Musul Mahomet et le Coran. Par J. Barthélemy SaintHilaire, p. 225. ↑ See Dozy's Hist. des Musulmans d'Espagne, ii., P. 53 mans, and their consequent inability to impose on the conquered the Musulman system in its integrity; (2) to the large number of Christians who professed Islam, but remained crypto-Christians, or carried their adopted religion so loosely that they retained most of their Christian habits, and intermarried with Christians; (3) to a large colony of Jews, whom the Moors employed extensively in administrative and educa tional work. "A familiar intercourse with the Europeans," says Prescott, "served to mitigate in the Spanish Arabs some of the more degrading superstitions incident to their religion, and to impart to them nobler ideas of the independence and dignity of man." The fair fabric of Moorish civilization in Spain was thus the product of agencies which were altogether foreign to Islam. It is not from an advocate for Christianity that I quote the following passage: : There never was any Arabian science, strictly speaking. In the first place, all the philosophy and science of the Mahomedans It really was Greek, Jewish, and Persian... arose in the distant parts of the Empire-in designates a reaction against Islamism, which Samarcand, Bokhara, Morocco, and Cordova. The Arabian language having become the language of the Empire, this philosophy is written in that language. But the ideas are not Arabian; the spirit is not Arabian.* Yet in spite of the modifications to which it was forced to submit, Islam undermined and corroded the civilization of Moorish Spain. It is the sympathetic Prescott who is constrained to admit that the partial civilization of the Spanish. Moors was "altogether alien from the genius of Mahomedanism,” and “only served to conceal, though it could not correct, the vices which it possessed in common with all Mahomedan institutions." + And it is one of their own historians who thus describes the Moors of Spain in the waning period of their domination-a domination which, according to Prescott, exhibited, even in the zenith of its intellectual glory, "all the horrors of anarchy and a ferocious despotism: ". Generals and captains no longer displayed their wonted valor; warriors became cowardly and base; the people of the country were in the greatest misery and poverty; the entire society was corrupted; and the body of Islam, deprived alike of life and soul, became a mere corpse. ‡ G. H. Lewes's Hist. of Phil., ii., pp. 34. 36. Cf. Seil's Faith of Islam, pp. 181-2; and Osborn's Islam under the Arabs, pp. 93-4. ↑ Ferdinand and Isabella, i., p. 296. Al-Makkhari. Translated by Don Pascual de All this shows that of all the divine books the Koran is the only one of which the text, words, and phrases have been communicated to a prophet by an audible voice. It is otherwise as regards the Pentateuch, the Gospel, and the other divine books. These the prophets received by the voice of revelation under the form of ideas, communicated while they were in a state of ecstasy, and written down in their own words when they returned to the nothing miraculous in the style of these Scripnormal state of humanity. There is therefore tures. Amari describes the Musulman régime | He quotes a verse from the Koran in supin Sicily in almost identical language.* port of this, and proceeds: There is a monotonous sameness in the history of all Musulman countries, as of patients smitten with one mortal disease. The symptoms may vary superficially, but the malady is the same in all, and the cause is Islam. Nor is the explanation far to seek. Islam rests on the Koran, though not on the Koran alone, as I shall show presently. But let us begin with the Koran. That book occupies in Islamic theology a place generically different from that occupied by the Bible in Christian theology. In proof of this it will In proof of this, Khaldoun refers to the suffice to quote the testimony of Ibu Khaldoun, whom Mohl truly calls "the 75th sura of the Koran, where Mahomed Montesquieu of Islam."+ Born in Tunis is bidden "not to move his tongue too in A.D. 1332, Ibn Khaldoun went to Spain eagerly in order to repeat the divine words." But, continues the divine voice, in 1362, and was employed in various "when we recite the words, then follow capacities, including that of prime ministhou the recital, and verily it shall be ours ter, by the Musulman sovereign of Granada. His life was full of vicissitudes, to make them clear to thee." In short, and he filled various important offices in the Koran, in Islamic belief, was written Musulman States in Asia and Africa, as before all time, every word and letter of by the finger of God in the highest heaven well as in Europe. He made the pilgrim-it, in the Arab tongue; was then, at the age of Mecca, was the prisoner and then the trusted friend of Timor, and was for a considerable time grand cadi of Cairo, where he died in A.D. 1406. His vast and various experience; his erudition; his unquestioned orthodoxy, refined by contact with the exotic civilization of Granada; his profound knowledge of Musul. man theology and law, acquired by study and by practice on the judgment-seat; his reputation throughout the Musulman world, all combine to make Ibn Khaldoun an authority on the dogmas and fruits of Islam whom no Muslim would question. The quotations which I about to make are from his " "Prolegomena," in the French translation from the Arabic (three quarto volumes), published in the grand collection of "Notices et Extraits des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Impériale et Autres Bibliothèques, publiés par l'Institut Impèriale de France." What, then, according to Ibn Khaldoun, is the place of the Koran in the dogmatic faith of Islam all over the world? Here are his words : ‡ · am predestined time, taken down to the third heaven by the angel Gabriel, and there recited, word for word, to Mahomed in an audible voice in suras, or chapters, as cccasion required, and was by him miraculously reproduced from memory. This is an article of faith throughout the world be the last revelation of the divine will to of Islam; and as the Koran professes to man, it follows of course that nothing which is sanctioned in the Koran, explicitly or implicitly, can ever be abrogated, altered, or become obsolete. Nobody who realizes this fact will believe that the Koran can possibly be a preparatory discipline, like Greek philosophy, for which the Koran has been praised for Christianity. The great positive truth But the God of Islam is a torso, and a proclaiming so resolutely is monotheism. somewhat forbidding one. He is an Oriental despot, whose omnipotent will is The will of Allah transmutes the moral uncontrolled by any moral considerations. character of human actions, making that to be holy which before was sin, and vice verså. On this I shall have to remark further on. Here I wish only to direct Sheik-ul-Islam, explanatory of the creed of Islam, has Since this was written a remarkable letter from the been published. The following sentence bears out the statement in the text: "Il faut attribuer, comme un article de foi, le bien et le mal à la providence de Dieu." Cf. Ibn Khaldoun, i. 268: " Dieu a implanté le bien et le mal dans la nature humaine, ainsi qu'il l'a dit luimême dans le Koran: La perversité et la vertu arri vent à l'âme humaine par l'inspiration de Dieu." This is the teaching of the Koran; nor is there any recognition in it of the doctrine of God's fatherhood in the secondary sense in which the Greek poet, as quoted by St. Paul, predicated of all men: "We also are his offspring." The Koran, too, denies the crucifixion of Christ. And this, be it remembered, is the doctrine of a book which every Muslim believes to have been written from all eternity by God himself, and to be forever unchangeable in its minutest details. Muslims may amuse themselves by experimenting on the credulity of Christians, and assuring them, as Latif Bey assured Canon Isaac Taylor at Cairo, that in Muslim belief there is no irreconcilable difference between Christianity and Islam. "Primitive Christianity he [Latif Bey] accepts; but he thinks that in the time of Constantine the pure teaching of the Apostolic age became overlaid with certain superstitions which Muslims are unable to receive." Are the fatherhood of God and the crucifixion of Christ among these "superstitions"? * But even if the Koran were as favorable to Christianity as it is in fact the reverse, we must bear in mind that Islam does not rest practically on the Koran (of which Mahomedans in the mass know very little), but on the Koran as interpreted by the traditions, which are summed up and stereotyped in the Cheri'at or sacred law. On this law reposes not only the religious, but the social and civil administration of every Musulman State. By the traditions (Ahadis) are meant the sayings and doings of the Prophet, and even things which he is believed to have sanctioned implicitly by his silence, as reported by his widow Ayesha and by his companions. Mahomed is believed by every orthodox Muslim to have been divinely inspired in all he said and did or tacitly sanctioned. The traditions are therefore supplementary to the Koran and its authoritative interpreters in all doubtful matters, and they form a code of unchangeable laws † See Canon Isaac Taylor's letter in Times of December 27, 1887 which can never be repealed, altered, or modified, and which deal with all the affairs of life-religious, political, and social. They are believed to be emanations of the divine will, with which it would be impious for man to meddle. Mahomed himself, indeed, as we shall see presently, modified or abrogated by a fresh revelation from on high any part of the Koran that became inconvenient to him. But his death closed all further communication between God and man. There is no living voice in the Church of Islam to reconcile the past with the present, and make provision for the future. It claims an infallibility more sweeping and more rigid than that of the Vatican decrees, but it is the infallibility of a dead pontiff, an ignorant and immoral Bedouin, who died twelve centuries ago. A Church which claims to have a living organ of infallibility always to guide it, one pope succeeding another in perpetuity, may perchance be convicted of infringing the laws of logic or contradicting the facts of history. But solvitur ambulando: the infallible voice moves on and accommodates itself to circumstances. Islam is a vast militant Papacy, aspiring to universal dominion; but it has only one pope, whom death long ago silenced forever. Islam therefore cannot move on; it is bound and mummified in the cerements of its founder, and cannot accommodate itself to fresh emergencies. It has no Urim and Thummim to interpret the present, no line of prophets to prepare the way for future development. Its sacred law is not a system of vivifying principles, like Judaism or Christianity, capable of indefinite expansion, but a code of minute and inflexible rules which cramp the mind and bar all further progress. Canon Isaac Taylor claims for Islam an educational mission, as being, at worst, a system of “ half-truths" leading up to Christianity. It is not half-truths, but mutilated truths, which Islam preaches. A child will develop into a man. But an adult man, deprived of arms and legs, is not in process of development, but of degeneration. Islam is not on the way towards Christianity; it is Christianity truncated, disfigured, and tattooed with a heterogeneous mixture of pagan and Talmudic fable and superstition. The half-truths of Islam are thus in process of degradation, not of development. They belong to the class described by Tennyson: "Dont les dispositions invariables.. dureront jusqu'au Jugement Dernier." (Letter of Sheik-ul- A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest Islam.) of lies; A lie which is all a lie may be met and fought | ence he enters. The dress of the zimmi with outright; But a lie which is part a truth is a harder mat- Islam has ever been and will ever remain Islam divides the world into Dar-ulIslam and Dar-ul-Harb; the Abode of Islam and the Abode of Strife. To Darul-Harb Islam offers the Koran or the sword. But the enforcement of this alternative is not always practicable, and it is a doctrine of Islam that the holy war must not be waged till there is a reasonable prospect of its success. But, latent or active, the war itself is chronic, and no member of Dar-ul-Harb can ever become a citizen of Dar-ul-Islam except through the proselyte's gate. Islam may deign to use the brains and arms of the infidel, but the non-Musulman can never aspire to the rights and privileges of citizenship. Musurus Pasha, for instance, who spent so many years as Turkish ambassador in London, has never been a citizen of the Ottoman Empire, and could not be without a violation of the sacred law, which it is beyond the power of the sultan and ulema combined to sanction. To the kitabi, however, Islam offers a third choice—namely, the Koran, tribute, or the sword. Those who agree to pay tribute receive the amân, or protection that is, the right to live on submission to certain cruel and degrading conditions; among which are the following. The zimmis (tributaries) must be distinguished by their dress, the animal they ride, and its saddle. In case of necessity, and then only, they may ride a donkey, provided that instead of a saddle they use a coarse cushion like the panniers of an ass; they must never ride horses or camels. In public they must wear the kosteef (a girdle of leather or coarse wool, called zunnar in Saracenic Sicily) to distinguish them from the Muslims. zimmi must dismount when he meets a A Muslim, and bow low with crossed hands, in token of inferiority and submission, while the Muslim passes, although the zimmi be a nobleman and the Muslim a ragged beggar. This lowly salutation is always due from the zimmi to any Muslim who passes him or into whose pres I.e., "people of the book"-people possessing Divine Scriptures-viz., Christians, Jews, and Sabæans. wool, silk, or satin, and his headgear must must not be of rich cloth, such as fine be different in shape from the Muslim's, and made of coarse material, such as common cotton, and of a sombre color. His shoes also must be of the coarsest quality. The zimmi's garments, moreover, must be short, with the pockets on the breast like those of a woman. to sit in the presence of a Muslim, though He is forbidden the zimmi be a nobleman or archbishop and the Muslim a beggar or slave. He must have a special sign on his door, so that beggars may not say, you.", The zimmi must not frequent the "God bless same bath as the Muslim, or draw water from the same well, or occupy the same quarter of a town. He is not allowed to bear arms, and his evidence cannot be received against a Muslim; so that if a hundred Christians witness a murder, or any other crime committed by a Muslim, the criminal must go free because there is no legal evidence against him. The zimmis must not build any places of worship in a Musulman State. They may repair or rebuild the old places of worship existing before their country became Dar-ulIslam; but it must be on the old sites and within the old dimensions. The zimmi who converts a Muslim is guilty of a capital offence, and so is the convert from Islam; while, on the other hand, the zimmi who tries to dissuade any one from becoming a Muslim is guilty of a heinous offence. The rancor of Islam pursues the unfortunate zimmi, the Christian especially, even to the grave and beyond it. The Christian is forbidden to celebrate the obsequies of the departed with usual ceremonies, and the following is a speci men of the form of burial certificate given to Christians under the sacred law of Islam: Mary that the impure, putrified, stinking carWe certify to the priest of the Church of case of Sardeh, damned this day, may be concealed under ground. (Sealed) EL SAID MEHEMED FAIZI, téristique; c'est le tezkérèh, permis d'inhumation." dren were forced to embrace Islam or die, and the victims of this forced conversion had the figure of the cross branded on the soles of their feet, so that they might always trample on the symbol of the faith which they had been compelled to renounce. After all this, it is a small matter to add that Christians are forbid. den by the sacred law to own land in a Musulman State. spatch from Consul Wood, of Damascus, who are liable to be fleeced and killed ad in July, 1885, when the fleets and armies libitum by their masters. Everybody of Christian England and France were knows that the Janissaries were a select defending the Turkish Empire, the atten- corps of Musulman soldiers, consisting tion of the British ambassador is called partly of Christian captives, but chiefly of to the distinction usually made in the offi- Christian children who were delivered to cial Turkish Gazette in describing the the sultan in obedience to the tribute of death of Musulmans and non-Musulmans blood imposed on vanquished Christian respectively. For instance, in "an enact-nations. These captive and tribute chilment lately promulgated for the administration of the estates of Turkish subjects, the word tewafa, or mat, is used for deceased Musulmans, which means 'died; but the word halik is used for Christians" — a word which, “in the vernacular language, when employed, as in the present instance, with reference to bishops, priests, and Christians, means those whose souls are lost or damned." * There is nothing that need surprise us in this, for, accord- But I may be told that the government ing to the creed of Islam, eternal perdition of Turkey has changed the laws which I is the doom of the non-Musulman world. have quoted, and has put its Christian All this contumely, says Amari, is in-subjects on a footing of equality with the flicted in order that the zimmis "may not Muslims. I know that the Porte has done forget their inferiority for a moment this on paper, especially in the Khatti(perchè non si dementicasse in alcuno in- humayoun, published after the Crimean stante la inferiorità loro)," † and he adds war. But I know also that all such paper that, during the Musulman domination in reforms are mere dust cast into the eyes Sicily, every Christian and Jew was of Christian Europe. The sultan cannot obliged to wear a white patch on the abolish a single article of the sacred law. shoulder, bearing in the former case the Any attempt to do so involves, ipso facto, figure of a monkey, in the latter that of a forfeiture of his throne. No decree of jackass. The doors of synagogues and the sultan touching any part of the sacred churches were similarly marked; and law has any force till it has received the when the collector takes the tribute from fatvah (dogmatic sanction) of the sheikthe zimmi, says the sacred law, "he ul-Islam. Neither the Khatti-humayoun should treat him very harshly, as by shak- nor any other infraction of the sacred law ing him, beating him on the breast, drag- has ever received this sanction, and every ging him to the ground; and should say Muslim knows that these reforms have, to him at the same time, 'Give the tribute, therefore, no legal force whatever. Out O zimmi, O enemy of Allah;' and this he of a multitude of illustrations of this fact shall do in order to degrade and disgrace I select the following. Vice-Consul Roghim." Living or dead the Christian is ers, writing from Palestine in the summer exposed to the most opprobrious epithets of 1858, says that he remonstrated with in the vocabulary of Islam. He is a the cadi of Nazareth, who had just proghinour, that is, "a man without a soul; "hibited a social gathering of Christians and an ordinary epithet in official docu- which some Muslims were wont to attend, ments is "hog." Übicini gives an extract because the faith of the latter might be from an official report presented to the shaken. "The cadi," says Mr. Rogers, sultan, in which we meet with such ex- "used some strong language, saying that pressions as "règlements du porc, que any Muslim who should become a Chrisl'on nomme de pape "— ¿.e., papish priest; tian would be murdered according to the "la nature perverse de cette troupe de tenets of the holy law, and he who percochons "i.e., Christians. The com-verted him would bear the responsibility." mon designation for the Christian sub. jects of the Musulman power is rayahs i.e., flock of sheep; a fit name for a people Eastern Papers. Presented to Parliament, pt. xviii., p. 13. i., pp. 476-7. Cf. Kanitz, Donau-Bulgarien und der Balkan, pp. 104-6. Lettres sur la Turquie, ii., p. 445. The italics are Ubicini's. The vice-consul naturally quoted the sultan's Khatti-humayoun. "The cadi answered disdainfully, The sultan eats melons,' which is a vulgar expression, meaning that the sultan talks nonsense. I remonstrated, at which the cadi repeated his remark, adding that his Majesty's officers and subjects are only bound to |