eddying skirmish, of which each newcomer could relate an episode from his own remote experience?

We meet, as we walk among them, an old acquaintance, a Sheikh from Mecca, a tall, burly Arab, glorious in the green turban that marks his descent from the Prophet, resplendent in hereditary embroideries, and wearing in his sash a great dagger with a golden hilt, the ransom of a whole caravan of slaves, the price of a herd of camels. A man of affairs, accustomed to treat with Pashas and spies from Yildiz Palace, he has come on legal business to Cairo. He tells us with what satisfaction the citizens of Mecca and Medina watch the approach of the Sultan's railroad from Damascus; how they count their gains from the coming influx of pilgrims; while the Bedouin of the Desert wonders whether a train will be as easy to blackmail as a caravan. We ask him, as a doctor in Islam, whether it is really quite orthodox to ignore the Prophet's injunction-that the pilgrimage must be made either on foot or on camel-back. He smiles an easy deprecation of the question; the pilgrimage is to him a matter of business. We quit him, to step warily among the busy fellaheen, who memorise the Koran with the same stolid industry with which they would follow the slow steps of their plough-oxen. We brush, as we go, against a tall young African, black as ebony, but with Arab features. He has just arrived from Bornu, on the edge of the Sahara. A fellow student lays a hand on his arm, to see what book it is that he is carrying. The freshman turns angrily round, shouting, gesticulating, and even threatening to draw his knife. "He has only just come to the Azhar," a sophisticated Egyptian student explains, "he thinks we all want to rob him." One's brain reels at the thought of the mental processes which will go on in the head of the poor, puzzled Bornese during his three years in Cairo, as he learns, with the memory of the desert behind him, to thread his way among electric tramcars and automobiles, turns from the Koran to the daily Arabic press, jostles with Europeans in the street, and meets in the café some Nationalist agitator, who seems to him wiser and bolder than any European, yet is, despite all his unfathomed lore, his own brother in Islam.

If ever there came a ruler to Cairo who aspired to conquer the mind of the Moslem world, it is with the Azhar that he would begin. Here are made the learning, the theology, the jurisprudence of two continents. Could you but change the mental outlook of the Azhar, in a generation you would transform the thinking of two continents. One trembles to think of the risk to the world's last conservatism which this centralisation of the spiritual life of Islam involves. Imagine the irruption into this

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stagnant world of some teacher of genius, saint, dialectician, and orator, armed with the learning of the West and the piety of the East, who should give to the Mohamedan world a volume of Essays and Reviews," and nail his theses to the Azhar doors. It has not happened yet, and no conqueror has seen his chance. Napoleon, for all his grandiose dreams of a conquest of the East with the aid of a regenerated Islam, was so little aware of the significance of the Azhar, that he stabled his troopers' horses in its colonnades. Mohamed Ali, perhaps because he was, like most Albanians, a member of the latitudinarian Becktashi sect, felt no interest in the Azhar, unless it were to covet its revenues. His method of Europeanising Egypt was to send off batches of unwilling students in chains to study the sciences in Paris. His successors, the Khedives, followed his policy of creating a little isolated Westernised secular State on the top of the unchanging world of the masses and the priesthood. The result has been the development of a limited class of officials and professional men, speaking English or French, contemptuous of the priestly caste, verging on Free Thought, and utterly isolated from the masses of the agricultural population.

The Azhar still controls the thinking of the real Egypt. It furnishes the priesthood, the teachers of all the village schools, the teachers of the Arabic language and literature even in the secondary schools, and the judges and barristers who administer the canon law of status, marriage, and inheritance. They have come from a University where it is still the correct opinion that the earth is flat. The Azhar, unchallenged in its theological prestige, is decadent even as a school of Oriental learning. Of the active interest in logic, metaphysics, and mathematics which once ruled within its walls, little or nothing remains. The Azhar never was a centre of bold philosophical speculation as Cordova was, while Europe was still barbarian. But it must have attained, before the deadening Turkish conquest, an incomparably higher level of intellectual life than it reaches to-day. The old curiosity about nature and history is hopelessly dead, nor did the Arab philosophers who found a way of grafting Aristotle on Mahomet, leave successors. I doubt if there is now among the whole regular teaching staff of the Azhar a single doctor who could read a European book. Even the teaching of elementary mathematics is neglected. What this contempt for secular lore involves can be realised only when one meets in the villages the graduates of the Azhar who give to the children of the peasantry all the instruction they ever receive. I met in the Fayoum a young man whom I should judge to be a favourable

specimen of his class. He had recently graduated in Cairo. The "notables" of his district had built for him a clean and decent little school. His wages averaged about £1 a monthone-third of the pay which an English official will give to his illiterate Nubian man-of-all-work. He was anxious to increase it by earning the Government grant of £10 a year. The obstacle was that he knew no arithmetic, and I found him busily conning a little text-book which explained the mysteries of the four simple rules. One sees, moreover, but little hope for the future. The Nationalists spend all their energies in battling against the British occupation. Yet the first step towards the creation of an educated nation which might conceivably make Parliamentary government a success, is the reform of the Azhar, and through it of the priestly caste. Here, in this one allimportant field, Egyptian opinion is supreme, and no English "adviser" stands in the way of the national will. A little has been achieved in the past two years, but it was done against the opposition of the Khedive, by two strong men who had the confidence of Lord Cromer-the late Grand Mufti, the Sheikh Mohamed Abdou, and the present Minister of Education, Saad Pasha Zaghloul. Thanks to them, a corps of black-coated lay teachers from the Government schools now enters the Azhar to instruct the students in history and geography. More interesting is the immensely successful experiment of creating a postgraduate school, cutside the Azhar, but affiliated to it, where promising ex-students are trained for the work of the religious law-courts, which still control the whole family life of Egypt. Here even natural science has been insinuated into the curriculum, and Saad Pasha explained to me how he had induced the doctors of the Azhar to sanction the teaching of physics by baptising it "The Science of the Properties with which the Beneficent Creator has endowed Bodies."

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It is commonly said that Islam is an essentially unprogressive religion. Lord Cromer's recent book on Egypt has stated this position very forcibly. The fact that Mohamedan countries are intellectually and morally stagnant is only too obvious. But is it Islam or the Mohamedans themselves who are to blame? Is Islam in its very nature incapable of change and growth and adaptation, or is it the economic and political conditions of the East which have caused Mohamedans to interpret it in an ultraconservative sense? On the answer to this question depends in the end the future of the Moslem world. If Islam is itself the cause of the present decay and stagnation, then clearly we may expect for the future nothing much better than the present. There will always be a relatively enlightened upper class, agnostic

in its outlook.

But it will remain for this reason quite incapable of influencing the believing masses.

A student of comparative religions who judged of Islam by the Koran would answer such a question at once and in the most pessimistic sense. Islam sanctions slavery, contemplates a state of war as normal and even desirable, restricts industry by forbidding interest, cramps the growth of legislation by basing its codes on a theocratic sanction, leaves little scope for the free play of speculative thought, and, worst of all, perpetuates the primitive Oriental view of women. Here in a sentence is the case against Islam, and a very formidable case it is. But all history proves the folly of basing any sociological criticism of a religion on its inspired texts. Mankind selects just as much from the teachings of its prophets as it finds it convenient to adopt. It explains away what is not suited to its needs, and a rapidly changing society is always ready to invent new methods of exegesis. Islam, from the point of view of the sociologist, is just so much of the Koran as Moslems really do observe, and Christianity, from the same standpoint, is not the idealism of the Sermon on the Mount, but the average teaching of the organised churches. Christians, with the exception of the Quakers and the Dourkhobors, have never found a difficulty in reconciling armies and law-courts with the Christian teaching about non-resistance to evil, and Moslems are quite as ready to select and explain their texts. The history of modern European civilisation is indeed the record of the brushing aside of ecclesiastical claims and prohibitions, many of them as absolute as those for which Islam stands, and as sharply opposed to modern industrial civilisation. Islam certainly prescribes a religious law which ought in theory to cover the whole field of civil and criminal jurisprudence. But the Medieval Church also maintained its canon law, and the secularisation of our codes, after centuries of conflict, is not even yet complete. The Church in the Middle Ages was quite as hostile to interest and usury as Islam-that is why the Jews became the hereditary usurers of Europe. Art was cramped for centuries by an ascetic hatred of beauty quite as formidable as the Mohamedan prohibition of portraiture. Slavery, though it can claim no Christian warrant, was protected by religious sentiment. Portuguese bishops blessed the captives as they embarked on the West Coast, and Boswell argued that to check the slave-trade was to "close the gates of mercy on mankind." St. Paul did not prescribe the seclusion of women in the Mohamedan sense, but he is still quoted against every modern tendency of emancipation.

It is important to recall these facts, because they show that

every society has in some phase of its evolution to struggle against the conservatism of its organised churches. The history of Mohamedan peoples shows the same readiness to move forward in spite of ecclesiastical barriers. When the Arabs first broke upon civilisation, they burned the library at Alexandria; a few centuries later they alone in Europe kept alive in their Spanish schools the tradition of Greek philosophy and the habit of free speculation. It is true that Mahomet formally prohibited portraiture and sculpture. Yet there are numerous statues of Egyptian statesmen, Khedives, and soldiers in the streets and public buildings of Cairo, and even prominent members of the priestly caste allow themselves to be photographed. The Turkish Sultans in the last century quietly relegated the canon law to the dust heap, and substituted for it a version of the Napoleonic code, retaining the religious law only in so far as it bears on marriage and inheritance. There are endless subtleties to explain away the passages in the Koran which make for a constant state of war and intolerance towards other religions-there are even forged documents enjoining toleration and equality ascribed to Mahomet, worthy of the inventiveness of the early Christian compilers of spurious epistles. No religious precept, even in the East, survives in the end against the argument of convenience. Egypt supplies in this respect a curious contrast. The upper classes long ago ceased to observe the letter of the Prophet's prohibition of interest and usury. They patronise banks, float limited companies (e.g., for the creation of a Nationalist newspaper), and buy stocks and shares. The peasants, on the other hand, can rarely be persuaded, despite some authoritative religious pronouncements, that it is permissible to deposit money at interest in the Post Office Savings Bank. Their economic existence is still so primitive that they suffer very little in this respect by their rigid obedience to the Koran. On the other hand, where a strict obedience would expose them to intolerable inconveniences, they display a total absence of scruple. The women of the peasants in Egypt are quite as free in all their movements and relationships as are the Christian women of European Turkey. They walk about unveiled even when they enter a town, or talk with a man. The miserable village huts render any attempt at privacy or the seclusion of the women quite impossible. One may even see young women talking gaily to young men in the street and indulging in what looks like a brisk and untrammelled flirtation. Poverty compelled the peasant women to work, and religion has failed-if it ever attempted-to veil and imprison them. No one is shocked or surprised, and no sect of literalists attempts to bring the peasant