528 MOHAMMEDISM 



of Allah in creation and providence. He may look at nature, but not 

 so narrowly as to distract him for a moment from nature's God. Free 

 examination and speculation without the ever-present recognition of 

 a tremendous, overshadowing Personality is denied. The world is a 

 perpetual miracle, carried out from instant to instant by this Being. 

 Nature in the sense of law does not exist. At best there is a certain 

 uniformity or custom on which man may fairly depend. But, first and 

 last, it is for him to take humbly what comes to him from day to day 

 at the hand of Allah and to keep his thoughts fixed upon Allah and 

 upon nothing else. From Him he has come, and to Him he must 

 return when the world, like a many-colored bubble, has broken and 

 vanished forever. 



Such conceptions as these could never stir to intellectual life, or 

 create a great period of civilization. Yet the period was there and 

 with it our problem, a problem, to my mind, as yet unsolved. Soluble 

 of course it is, but I can put before you no solution now. My object is 

 rather to urge the fact of this problem, a fact very generally obscured 

 or denied. Let me put the problem in a word. We have the Muslim 

 civilization to explain. None of the elements in it the Arab race, 

 the conquered peoples, Islam seem to be adequate to an explana- 

 tion. It may be that we are pressing too closely on the mystery of the 

 ebbing and flowing of the nations and their lives, or endeavoring to 

 estimate conditions which, once gone, can never be re-created or re- 

 understood. But so long as the European renaissance can be weighed 

 or conditioned, it would seem that this great Asiatic renaissance 

 should be possible of intelligible statement. 



Let us turn now to the second element. Why had the Muslim civ- 

 ilization no permanence? Here, again, it is necessary to distinguish. 

 Islam and what I have called the Muslim civilization are two very 

 separate things. They can endure apart from one another, I may 

 hazard the assertion, more easily, and are more thinkable as separate 

 entities than Christianity and the Christian civilization. Christianity, 

 some will tell us, is passing in its historical sense, while the Christian 

 civilization is most enduring. However that may be, the essential 

 concepts of Christianity are so absolutely part of the Christian civili- 

 zation, that to run a line between the two that will follow any bearings 

 but those of a confessionalist, is manifestly impossible. In Islam it 

 was never so. The Muslim civilization may be said to have flourished 

 in spite of Islam. The great thinkers in Islam, apart from some pro- 

 fessed theologians, drew no stimulus or guidance from it; often they 

 were hopelessly at odds with it. In the case of the more original 

 theologians even, it would be possible to knock away the Muham- 

 madan scaffolding and let the religious edifice which they had reared 

 stand by itself. Their necessary conceptions are purely general, com- 

 pounded of mysticism and theism. The peculiarities of Islam, the 



