Wilfred Scawen Blunt - The Future of Islam

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THE FUTURE OF ISLAM

BY

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

"La taknatu addurru yontharu akduhu
Liauda ahsana fin nithami wa ajmala."

"Fear not. Often pearls are unstrung
To be put in better order."

_Published by permission of the Proprietors of the "Fortnightly Review"_

LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., 1, PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1882

PREFACE.

These essays, written for the _Fortnightly Review_ in the summer and
autumn of 1881, were intended as first sketches only of a maturer work
which the author hoped, before giving finally to the public, to complete
at leisure, and develop in a form worthy of critical acceptance, and of
the great subject he had chosen. Events, however, have marched faster
than he at all anticipated, and it has become a matter of importance
with him that the idea they were designed to illustrate should be given
immediate and full publicity. The French, by their invasion of Tunis,
have precipitated the Mohammedan movement in North Africa; Egypt has
roused herself for a great effort of national and religious reform; and
on all sides Islam is seen to be convulsed by political portents of
ever-growing intensity. He believes that his countrymen will in a very
few months have to make their final choice in India, whether they will
lead or be led by the wave of religious energy which is sweeping
eastwards, and he conceives it of consequence that at least they should
know the main issues of the problem before them. To shut their eyes to
the great facts of contemporary history, because that history has no
immediate connection with their daily life, is a course unworthy of a
great nation; and in England, where the opinion of the people guides the
conduct of affairs, can hardly fail to bring disaster. It should be
remembered that the modern British Empire, an agglomeration of races
ruled by public opinion in a remote island, is an experiment new in the
history of the world, and needs justification in exceptional
enlightenment; and it must be remembered, too, that no empire ever yet
was governed without a living policy. The author, therefore, has
resolved to publish his work, crude as it is, without more delay, in the
hope that it may be instrumental in guiding the national choice. He is,
nevertheless, fully aware of its defects both in accuracy and
completeness, and he can only hope that they may be pardoned him in view
of the general truth of the picture he has drawn.

Since the last of these essays was written, their author has returned to
Egypt, and has there had the satisfaction of finding the ideas, vaguely
foreshadowed by him as the dream of some few liberal Ulema of the Azhar,
already a practical reality. Cairo has now declared itself as the home
of progressive thought in Islam, and its university as the once more
independent seat of Arabian theology. Secured from Turkish interference
by the national movement of the Arabs, the Ulema of the Azhar have
joined heart and soul with the party of reform. The importance of this
event can hardly be overrated; and if, as now seems probable, a liberal
Mohammedan Government by a free Mohammedan people should establish
itself firmly on the Nile, it is beyond question that the basis of a
social and political Reformation for all Islam has been laid. It is more
than all a hopeful sign that extreme moderation with regard to the
Caliphate is observed by the Egyptian leaders. Independence, not
opposition, is the motto of the party; and no rent has been made or is
contemplated by them in the orthodox coat of Islam. Abd el Hamid Khan is
still recognized as the actual Emir el Mumenin, and the restoration of a
more legitimate Caliphate is deferred for the day when its fate shall
have overtaken the Ottoman Empire. This is as it should be. Schism would
only weaken the cause of religion, already threatened by a thousand
enemies; and the premature appearance of an Anti-Caliph in Egypt or
Arabia, however legitimate a candidate he might be by birth for the
office, would divide the Mohammedan world into two hostile camps, and so
bring scandal and injury on the general cause. In the meantime, however,
liberal thought will have a fair field for its development, and can
hardly fail to extend its influence wherever the Arabic language is
spoken, and among all those races which look on the Azhar as the centre
of their intellectual life. This is a notable achievement, and one which
patience may turn, perhaps in a very few years, to a more general
triumph. There can be little doubt now that the death of Abd el Hamid,
or his fall from Empire, will be the signal for the return of the
Caliphate to Cairo, and a formal renewal there by the Arabian mind of
its lost religious leadership.

To Mohammedans the author owes more than a word of apology. A stranger
and a sojourner among them, he has ventured on an exposition of their
domestic griefs, and has occasionally touched the ark of their religion
with what will seem to them a profane hand; but his motive has been
throughout a pure one, and he trusts that they will pardon him in virtue
of the sympathy with them which must be apparent in every line that he
has written. He has predicted for them great political misfortunes in
the immediate future, because he believes that these are a necessary
step in the process of their spiritual development; but he has a supreme
confidence in Islam, not only as a spiritual, but as a temporal system
the heritage and gift of the Arabian race, and capable of satisfying
their most civilized wants; and he believes in the hour of their
political resurgence. In the meantime he is convinced that he serves
their interests best by speaking what he holds to be the truth regarding
their situation. Their day of empire has all but passed away, but there
remains to them a day of social independence better than empire.
Enlightened, reformed and united in sympathy, Mussulmans need not fear
political destruction in their original homes, Arabia, Egypt, and North
Africa; and these must suffice them as a Dar el Islam till better days
shall come. If the author can do anything to help them to preserve that
independence they may count upon him freely within the limits of his
strength, and he trusts to prove to them yet his sincerity in some
worthier way than by the publication of these first essays.

CAIRO, _January 15th, 1882_.

CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
CENSUS OF THE MOHAMMEDAN WORLD. THE HAJ 1

CHAPTER II.
THE MODERN QUESTION OF THE CALIPHATE 48

CHAPTER III.
THE TRUE METROPOLIS--MECCA 90

CHAPTER IV.
A MOHAMMEDAN REFORMATION 132

CHAPTER V.
ENGLAND'S INTEREST IN ISLAM 174

THE FUTURE OF ISLAM.

CHAPTER I.

CENSUS OF THE MOHAMMEDAN WORLD.

THE HAJ.

In the lull, which we hope is soon to break the storm of party strife in
England, it may not perhaps be impossible to direct public attention to
the rapid growth of questions which for the last few years have been
agitating the religious mind of Asia, and which are certain before long
to present themselves as a very serious perplexity to British statesmen;
questions, moreover, which if not dealt with by them betimes, it will
later be found out of their power to deal with at all, though a vigorous
policy at the present moment might yet solve them to this country's very
great advantage.

The revival which is taking place in the Mohammedan world is indeed
worthy of every Englishman's attention, and it is difficult to believe
that it has not received anxious consideration at the hands of those
whose official responsibility lies chiefly in the direction of Asia; but
I am not aware that it has hitherto been placed in its true light before
the English public, or that a quite definite policy regarding it may be
counted on as existing in the counsels of the present Cabinet. Indeed,
as regards the Cabinet, the reverse may very well be the case. We know
how suspicious English politicians are of policies which may be
denounced by their enemies as speculative; and it is quite possible that
the very magnitude of the problem to be solved in considering the future
of Islam may have caused it to be put aside there as one "outside the
sphere of practical politics." The phrase is a convenient one, and is
much used by those in power amongst us who would evade the labour or the
responsibility of great decisions. Yet that such a problem exists in a
new and very serious form I do not hesitate to affirm, nor will my
proposition, as I think, be doubted by any who have mingled much in the
last few years with the Mussulman populations of Western Asia. There it
is easily discernible that great changes are impending, changes perhaps
analogous to those which Christendom underwent four hundred years ago,
and that a new departure is urgently demanded of England if she would
maintain even for a few years her position as the guide and arbiter of
Asiatic progress.

It was not altogether without the design of gaining more accurate
knowledge than I could find elsewhere on the subject of this Mohammedan
revival that I visited Jeddah in the early part of the past winter, and
that I subsequently spent some months in Egypt and Syria in the almost
exclusive society of Mussulmans. Jeddah, I argued, the seaport of Mecca
and only forty miles distant from that famous centre of the Moslem
universe, would be the most convenient spot from which I could obtain
such a bird's-eye view of Islam as I was in search of; and I imagined
rightly that I should there find myself in an atmosphere less provincial
than that of Cairo, or Bagdad, or Constantinople.

Jeddah is indeed in the pilgrim season the suburb of a great metropolis,
and even a European stranger there feels that he is no longer in a world
of little thoughts and local aspirations. On every side the politics he
hears discussed are those of the great world, and the religion
professed is that of a wider Islam than he has been accustomed to in
Turkey or in India. There every race and language are represented, and
every sect. Indians, Persians, Moors, are there,--negroes from the
Niger, Malays from Java, Tartars from the Khanates, Arabs from the
French Sahara, from Oman and Zanzibar, even, in Chinese dress and
undistinguishable from other natives of the Celestial Empire, Mussulmans
from the interior of China. As one meets these walking in the streets,
one's view of Islam becomes suddenly enlarged, and one finds oneself
exclaiming with Sir Thomas Browne, "Truly the (Mussulman) world is
greater than that part of it geographers have described." The permanent
population, too, of Jeddah is a microcosm of Islam. It is made up of
individuals from every nation under heaven. Besides the indigenous Arab,
who has given his language and his tone of thought to the rest, there is
a mixed resident multitude descended from the countless pilgrims who
have remained to live and die in the holy cities. These preserve, to a
certain extent, their individuality, at least for a generation or two,
and maintain a connection with the lands to which they owe their origin
and the people who were their countrymen. Thus there is constantly
found at Jeddah a free mart of intelligence for all that is happening in
the world; and the common gossip of the bazaar retails news from every
corner of the Mussulman earth. It is hardly too much to say that one can
learn more of modern Islam in a week at Jeddah than in a year elsewhere,
for there the very shopkeepers discourse of things divine, and even the
Frank Vice-Consuls prophesy. The Hejazi is less shy, too, of discussing
religious matters than his fellow Mussulmans are in other places.
Religion is, as it were, part of his stock-in-trade, and he is
accustomed to parade it before strangers. With a European he may do this
a little disdainfully, but still he will do it, and with less disguise
or desire to please than is in most places the case. Moreover--and this
is important--it is almost always the practical side of questions that
the commercial Jeddan will put forward. He sees things from a political
and economical point of view, rather than a doctrinal, and if fanatical,
he is so from the same motives, and no others, which once moved the
citizens of Ephesus to defend the worship of their shrines.

In other cities, Cairo and Constantinople excepted, the Ulema, or
learned men, of whom a stranger might seek instruction, would be found
busying themselves mainly with doctrinal matters not always interesting
at the present day, old-world arguments of Koranic interpretation which
have from time immemorial occupied the schools. But here even these are
treated practically, and as they bear on the political aspect of the
hour. For myself, I became speedily impressed with the advantage thus
afforded me, and neglected no opportunity which offered itself for
listening and asking questions, so that without pretending to the
possession of more special skill than any intelligent inquirer might
command, I obtained a mass of information I cannot but think to be of
great value--while this in its turn served me later as an introduction
to such Mussulman divines as I afterwards met in the North. Jeddah then
realized all my hopes and gratified nearly all my curiosities. I will
own, too, to having come away with more than a gratified curiosity, and
to having found new worlds of thought and life in an atmosphere I had
fancied to be only of decay. I was astonished at the vigorous life of
Islam, at its practical hopes and fears in this modern nineteenth
century, and above all at its reality as a moral force; so that if I had
not exactly come to scoff, I certainly remained, in a certain sense, to
pray. At least I left it interested, as I had never thought to be, in
the great struggle which seemed to me impending between the parties of
reaction in Islam and reform, and not a little hopeful as to its
favourable issue. What this is likely to be I now intend to discuss.

First, however, it will I think be as well to survey briefly the actual
composition of the Mohammedan world. It is only by a knowledge of the
elements of which Islam is made up that we can guess its future, and
these are less generally known than they should be. A stranger from
Europe visiting the Hejaz is, as I have said, irresistibly struck with
the vastness of the religious world in whose centre he stands.
Mohammedanism to our Western eyes seems almost bounded by the limits of
the Ottoman Empire. The Turk stands in our foreground, and has stood
there from the days of Bajazet, and in our vulgar tongue his name is
still synonymous with Moslem, so that we are apt to look upon him as, if
not the only, at least the chief figure of Islam. But from Arabia we see
things in a truer perspective, and become aware that beyond and without
the Ottoman dominions there are races and nations, no less truly
followers of the Prophet, beside whom the Turk shrinks into numerical
insignificance. We catch sight, it may be for the first time in their
real proportions, of the old Persian and Mogul monarchies, of the forty
million Mussulmans of India, of the thirty million Malays, of the
fifteen million Chinese, and the vast and yet uncounted Mohammedan
populations of Central Africa. We see, too, how important is still the
Arabian element, and how necessary it is to count with it, in any
estimate we may form of Islam's possible future. Turkey, meanwhile, and
Constantinople, retire to a rather remote horizon, and the Mussulman
centre of gravity is as it were shifted from the north and west towards
the south and east.

I was at some pains while at Jeddah to gain accurate statistics of the
Haj according to the various races and sects composing it, and with them
of the populations they in some measure represent. The pilgrimage is of
course no certain guide as to the composition of the Mussulman world,
for many accidents of distance and political circumstance interfere with
calculations based on it. Still to a certain extent a proportion is
preserved between it and the populations which supply it; and in default
of better, statistics of the Haj afford us an index not without value of
the degree of religious vitality existing in the various Mussulman
countries. My figures, which for convenience I have arranged in tabular
form, are taken principally from an official record, kept for some years
past at Jeddah, of the pilgrims landed at that port, and checked as far
as European subjects are concerned by reference to the consular agents
residing there. They may therefore be relied upon as fairly accurate;
while for the land pilgrimage I trust in part my own observations, made
three years ago, in part statistics obtained at Cairo and Damascus. For
the table of population in the various lands of Islam I am obliged to go
more directly to European sources of information. As may be supposed, no
statistics on this point of any value were obtainable at Jeddah; but by
taking the figures commonly given in our handbooks, and supplementing
and correcting these by reference to such persons as I could find who
knew the countries, I have, I hope, arrived at an approximation to the
truth, near enough to give a tolerable idea to general readers of the
numerical proportions of Islam. Strict accuracy, however, I do not here
pretend to, nor would it if obtainable materially help my present
argument.

The following is my table:--

TABLE OF THE MECCA PILGRIMAGE OF 1880.

| | | Total of
Nationality of Pilgrims. |Arriving|Arriving| Mussulman
|by Sea. |by Land.| population
| | | represented.
-----------------------------------------+--------+--------+------------
Ottoman subjects including pilgrims from | | |
Syria and Irak, but not from Egypt or | | |
Arabia proper | 8,500 | 1,000 | 22,000,000
| | |
Egyptians | 5,000 | 1,000 | 5,000,000
| | |
Mogrebbins ("people of the West"), that | | |
is to say Arabic-speaking Mussulmans | | |
from the Barbary States, Tripoli, | | |
Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco. These are | | |
always classed together and are not | | |
easily distinguishable from each other | 6,000 | ... | 18,000,000
| | |
Arabs from Yemen | 3,000 | ... | 2,500,000
| | |
" " Oman and Hadramaut | 3,000 | ... | 3,000,000
| | |
" " Nejd, Assir, and Hasa, most | | |
of them Wahhabites | ... | 5,000 | 4,000,000
| | |
" " Hejaz, of these perhaps | | |
10,000 Meccans | ... | 22,000 | 2,000,000
| | |
Negroes from Soudan | 2,000 | ... | 10,000,000(?)
| | |
" " Zanzibar | 1,000 | ... | 1,500,000
| | |
Malabari from the Cape of Good Hope | 150 | ... |
| | |
Persians | 6,000 | 2,500 | 8,000,000
| | |
Indians (British subjects) | 15,000 | ... | 40,000,000
| | |
Malays, chiefly from Java and Dutch | | |
subjects | 12,000 | ... | 30,000,000
| | |
Chinese | 100 | ... | 15,000,000
| | |
Mongols from the Khanates, included in | | |
the Ottoman Haj | ... | ... | 6,000,000
| | |
Lazis, Circassians, Tartars, etc. | | |
(Russian subjects), included in the | | |
Ottoman Haj | ... | ... | 5,000,000
| | |
Independent Afghans and Beluchis, | | |
included in the Indian and Persian | | |
Hajs | ... | ... | 3,000,000
|-----------------|------------
Total of Pilgrims present at Arafat | 93,250 |
Total Census of Islam |175,000,000

The figures thus roundly given require explanation in order to be of
their full value as a bird's-eye view of Islam. I will take them as
nearly as possible in the order in which they stand, grouping them,
however, for further convenience sake under their various sectarian
heads, for it must be remembered that Islam, which in its institution
was intended to be one community, political and religious, is now
divided not only into many nations, but into many sects. All, however,
hold certain fundamental beliefs, and all perform the pilgrimage to
Mecca, where they meet on common ground, and it is to this latter fact
that the importance attached to the Haj is mainly owing.

The main beliefs common to all Mussulmans are--

1. A belief in one true God, the creator and ordainer of all things.

2. A belief in a future life of reward or punishment.

3. A belief in a divine revelation imparted first to Adam and renewed at
intervals to Noah, to Abraham, to Moses, and to Jesus Christ, and last
of all in its perfect form to Mohammed. This revelation is not only one
of dogma, but of practice. It claims to have taught an universal rule
of life for all mankind in politics and legislation as well as in
doctrine and in morals. This is called Islam.

4. A belief in the Koran as the literal word of God, and of its inspired
interpretation by the Prophet and his companions, preserved through
tradition (Hadith).[1]

These summed up in the well-known "Kelemat" or act of faith, "There is
no God but God, and Mohammed is the apostle of God," form a common
doctrinal basis for every sect of Islam--and also common to all are the
four religious acts, prayer, fasting, almsgiving and pilgrimage,
ordained by the Koran itself. On other points, however, both of belief
and practice, they differ widely; so widely that the sects must be
considered as not only distinct from, but hostile to, each other. They
are nevertheless, it must be admitted, less absolutely irreconcileable
than are the corresponding sects of Christianity, for all allow the rest
to be distinctly within the pale of Islam, and they pray on occasion in
each other's mosques and kneel at the same shrines on pilgrimage.
Neither do they condemn each other's errors as altogether
damnable--except, I believe, in the case of the Wahhabites, who accuse
other Moslems of polytheism and idolatry. The census of the four great
sects may be thus roughly given--

1. The Sunites or Orthodox Mohammedans 145,000,000
2. The Shiites or Sect of Ali 15,000,000
3. The Abadites (Abadhiyeh) 7,000,000
4. The Wahhabites 8,000,000

The _Sunites_, or People of the Path, are of course by far the most
important of these. They stand in that relation to the other sects in
which the Catholic Church stands to the various Christian heresies, and
claim alone to represent that continuous body of tradition political and
religious, which is the sign of a living church. In addition to the
dogmas already mentioned, they hold that, after the Prophet and his
companions, other authorised channels of tradition exist of hardly less
authority with these. The sayings of the four first Caliphs, as
collected in the first century of the Mohammedan era, they hold to be
inspired and unimpeachable, as are to a certain extent the theological
treatises of the four great doctors of Islam, the Imams Abu Hanifeh,
Malek, Esh Shafy, and Hanbal, and after them, though with less and less
authority, the "fetwas," or decisions of distinguished Ulema, down to
the present day. The collected body of teaching acquired from these
sources is called the Sheriat (in Turkey the Sheriati Sherifeh) and is
the canon law of Islam. Nor is it lawful that this should be gainsaid;
while the Imams themselves may not inaptly be compared to the fathers of
our Christian Church. It is a dogma, too, with the Sunites that they are
not only an ecclesiastical but a political body, and that among them is
the living representative of the temporal power of the Prophet, in the
person of his Khalifeh or successor, though there is much division of
opinion as to the precise line of succession in the past and the
legitimate ownership of the title in the present. But this is too
intricate and important a matter to be entered on at present.

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