516 MOHAMMEDISM 



(4) the increasing estimation of individual formations within uni- 

 versal Islam; and 



(5) the consideration of the after-effects of pre-Islamic traditions 

 upon those popular and individual formations. 



VII 



Our review would be still more defective if we did not add one 

 more remark in appreciation of a means which has helped and still 

 helps us in a valuable way to produce significant progress in our 

 understanding of Islam. I have in mind the important documents 

 of Islamic religious science which are within our reach through the 

 labors of printers in the Orient itself. He who would in the sixth 

 decade of the past century study, for instance, one of the most 

 prominent monuments of the religious spirit of Islam, the Vivifica- 

 tion of Sciences, by Al-Ghazali, or other important works of this 

 author, had to seek access to the manuscripts of more or less access- 

 ible libraries. Among the great collections of traditions, others than 

 Bukhari were mostly known only by names or from quotations. Only 

 a few selected men had admittance to these others, no less import- 

 ant. It was seldom that an Occidental scholar got sight of the 

 mass of commentaries, in which an inappreciable philological 

 material, a valuable apparatus for text-critical and exegetical pur- 

 poses is accumulated, which is so precious in the very field of tradi- 

 tions. The oldest documents of the literature of legal institutions 

 were thought lost. The works of the theological scholastics, whence 

 we take our information about the nature and history of the dogmas 

 of Islam, were only know r n to a defective extent. All this has been 

 done away with for nearly three decades and a half, by printing in 

 Islamic countries: Turkey, Egypt, Northern Africa, India, Persia. 

 As even the strongest bulwark of ancient Islam, the holy city of 

 Mckka, had to permit telegraph wires to enter her consecrated 

 walls, in like manner she has become one of the centres of Islamic 

 printing. Those publications have furnished us with some of the most 

 important primary sources, sometimes in numerous bulky volumes 

 whose publication could never have been thought of in Europe or 

 America. And even that the most capital commentaries of the Koran, 

 for example the great exegetical work of Tabari in thirty parts and 

 the " Keys of the mystery " of the great dogmatic authority, Fakhr 

 al-din al-Razi, in eight bulky volumes, have become accessible to our 

 scholars, is due to the activity of Oriental typography. 



In view of the profit gained from such publications, we excuse 

 willingly the confusing and for our eyes most painful way in which 

 the Persian and Indian lithographs present the explanatory glosses 

 and marginal commentaries. The easy possibility of studying these 



