492 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1880- 



seen to have no religious worth, but which he carried 

 over into his system in order to facilitate the propagation 

 of his reformed doctrines. Yet many of the prejudices 

 which seem to us most distinctively Mohammedan have 

 no basis in the Koran. Even the practice of circumcision 

 is not a proper part of Islamism, and in some parts of 

 the Hejaz and of Yemen (among the Koreish, the Hodheil, 

 and the Aseer), where this ceremony takes the severer 

 form described by Captain Burton, all other Mohammedans 

 are despised and uncircumcised. In Yemen the moustache 

 and shaven chin of the Turk is thought to put him in one 

 class with the Christian the epithets of religious bigotry 

 are employed to express an antagonism which has nothing 

 to do with Islam. Moslem bigotry in the proper sense 

 of the word, and indeed almost all earnest feeling in con 

 nection with the religion of the Prophet, belongs, as 

 Dozy has so forcibly pointed out, not to the Arabs, but 

 to the races who received the Koran from their hands. So 

 within Arabia the mixed populations of the towns and 

 the coast, with their large element of negro blood, are 

 far more fanatical than the true unmixed Bedouin stems. 

 But even in the towns the jejune, practical, and, if I may 

 venture to say so, constitutionally irreligious habit of the 

 Arabic mind maintains its ascendancy, and fanaticism 

 is well under the control of self-interest. It is no secret 

 that the myriads of pilgrims who yearly stream to the 

 shrines of Mecca and Medina return disenchanted from 

 the supposed Holy Land, where they find the most sacred 

 solemnities of their religion to be thought of only as means 

 of pocketing an annual harvest of gold return protesting 

 that true Mohammedanism is not to be found in the 

 Hejaz, and that the Moslem receives more justice from 

 Christian Powers than from his co-religionists in the 

 central sanctuaries of Islam. In short, the religious con 

 victions of the Hejaz are a good deal like those of the 

 silversmiths of Ephesus, and owe their strength to what 

 can be made out of the concern. Speaking broadly, I 



