532 MOHAMMEDISM 



Middle Ages, is the kernel of the situation. Nor can the devastation 

 spread by the Mongol hordes be alleged as an adequate explanation. 

 Their ravages did not spread far enough; Egypt and North Africa, 

 for example, escaped, and our question affects all Muslim lands. 

 Wherever Islam has penetrated and a Muslim government been 

 established, we find this inevitable decadence, punctuated by brief 

 and successively smaller flowerings of a peculiar hothouse culture, 

 exceedingly narrowed in its scope. And curiously enough, such 

 periods are always a sign of weakening in the fabric of the state itself. 

 The more critical Muslims themselves learned to observe them and 

 knew that the state in which they appeared was nearing its close; 

 that some more barbaric and virile successor was about to arise and 

 overthrow it. These points the disintegrating and weakening 

 effect of culture, and the law that Muslim states change and pass 

 while Islam itself is unchanging and permanent are to be read, for 

 example, very clearly in the history of Muslim Spain. They made the 

 reconquest possible, and explain the puzzle that Spanish Islam, more 

 highly civilized certainly than Spanish Christendom, and with the 

 millions of Africa at its back, was in the end driven out. But that 

 brings us no nearer to the solution of the primary problems which 

 I have stated, and which are essentially and taken together the 

 question of the general relation of Islam to civilization. Practically, 

 they come out in another question, Is Islam capable of a permanent 

 and normally developing civilization? 



It is not my business here to offer answers to these questions. 

 Mine is the easier but less satisfactory part of stating the problems. 

 But from what has gone before, it will be seen in what direction 

 I feel, though very vaguely, that the solutions may lie. The absolute 

 grasp of Islam on all the sides of the lives of the Muslims has some- 

 thing to do with it. When theology, philosophy, science, law the 

 church and the state in all their phases of activity are allowed to 

 develop separately, much else will be possible. Again, when Islam 

 abandons which apparently it never can its essentially miracu- 

 lous view of the constitution of the universe, and makes some pro- 

 vision for a reign of law, Islam will be capable of continuous thought 

 and development. Thirdly, and to my mind, most certainly and em- 

 phatically, the learned must abandon their scholastically snobbish 

 attitude toward the unlearned masses. Knowledge, and with it civ- 

 ilization, must be made a thing not of the few but of the many. The 

 village school must be fostered even more than the university; Islam 

 has always known the latter; its weakness has been in the former. 

 Scholars must leave their learned ease and isolation and serenity of 

 thought and take the people into their confidence. The economy of 

 teaching must go, and the common-school master must cease to be the 

 butt of all the village jests. When this is accomplished, if accom- 



