PROGRESS OF ISLAMIC SCIENCE 499 



II 



It is no longer single errors of detail which we have to correct. 

 Of course some of them have prolonged their lives with the obstin- 

 ate perseverance peculiar to untruths, creeping, even to this day, 

 from manual to manual and belonging to the iron fund of Oriental 

 falsa. Some pet notions to which the Orientalists of the sixteenth 

 and seventeenth centuries clung very closely are now extirpated 

 root and branch like the seven nations of Canaan. For instance, 

 you could read in older works and it sometimes appears in news- 

 papers even to the present day that Muhammad found his last 

 resting-place in Mekka in the holy Ka'bah, and also that his tomb 

 there is the goal of the famous pilgrimage of Islam. The tale about 

 the magnetic walls, between which the coffin of the Prophet is sus- 

 pended in the air, has we hope vanished altogether. The books 

 about the East and the travels of the sixteenth and seventeenth 

 centuries could not do without that fable. The idea universally 

 spread in past centuries, that every Jew wishing to share the Pro- 

 phet's Paradise as a true Believer was obliged to pass through the 

 Christian religion, by being regularly baptized, as Jesus is also ac- 

 knowledged by Islam as a prophet, has likewise disappeared, though 

 Martinus Baumgarten of Niirnberg (1507) was not the last to believe 

 and copy the story. 1 



These and many other things, we are now luckily done with. 

 They did not endure until we had penetrated with our critical lead 

 into the depths of popular ideas. But what was sustained more 

 obstinately than a dozen such blunders was the thoroughly false 

 doctrine, which had caught hold on our educational literature; 

 namely, that the barrier between the two great divisions of Islam, 

 the Sunnites and Shi'ites, consists in this, that the latter recognize 

 beside the Koran nothing as an authority, while the former acknow- 

 ledge beside that revealed religious book also the Sunna, namely, 

 tradition, as a source of religious conduct and creed; an erroneous 

 view which to this day has not yet disappeared from the schools. 



But the errors in these particular questions can only be attributed 

 to false information. With correct information such blunders could 

 have been easily prevented. 



The true progress of the science of Islam, of which we are to speak 

 here, brings us into close connection with the forming and developing 

 forces and factors of Islam. You can now ask first of all, Do we 

 know and understand the Koran better than the scholars of the 

 preceding generation, and can we present this advanced knowledge 

 to an instructed public in a sure form? This first question we can 



1 Cf. the present writer's article: "Die synibolische Rose in den nordafri- 

 kanischen religiosen Orden," in Oesterreichische Monatsschrift fur den Orient, 1890, 

 p. 8 ff., where are presented a considerable number of such mistakes. 



