THE FUTURE OF ISLAM. 



75 



ceivable that Islam may one day be not only reconciled with 

 them, but even become their protector. We might similarly 

 point to the insurance office being now regarded as an 

 institution likely to be found in a Christian country ; and 

 yet the notion of providing to the utmost of our ability against 

 any contingency that could befall us on the morrow, might 

 seem to violate essentially the precept which forbids us to take 

 any thought for it. At a recent Oriental Congress a Turkish 

 gentleman read a paper proving that religious toleration was 

 from the first the watchword of Islam ; in a popular life of 

 Mohammed there is a chapter headed " Islam not propagated 

 l)y the sword " ; and ingenious writers have made the prophet 

 himself an advocate of monogamy. From the point of the 

 student of history these propositions are indefensible; but 

 where a biography is what is called dogmatic, where the actions 

 of a man are regarded as the pattern for other men's, and 

 where reverence for a particular name constitutes a mass of 

 political capital, it is more important for the race that his 

 life should be really exemplary than that it should be faithfully 

 recorded. What shocks us about the earliest biographers of 

 the prophet is that they are so truthful ; they produce a 

 picture that is entirely black, and fail to draw the obvious 

 inference that such a man deserves little but reprobation. The 

 newer biographer, who has learned from Europe what a pattern 

 of conduct should be like, paints his prophet in a style that 

 brings him near tliat pattern ; he hopes to make him the 

 patron of the newly-discovered virtues, just as moral and 

 metaphysical speculators of earlier times made Mohammed the 

 patron of their business. These efforts at re-writing history 

 are not to be discouraged, though with advancing years men 

 choose living models of conduct rather than those of which the 

 traits are blurred by antiquity. 



If the transformation of Islam into a patron of purity, 

 toleration, intellectual and artistic originality, be equivalent 

 to the destruction of the system, it is an end which, though 

 far from realization yet, by no means lies out of the direction 

 which Islam in some places at least is taking. Yet the 

 course of events so often stultifies the most careful forecasts 

 that it can only be suggested as one of many possibilities, but 

 probably as that which will require the smallest amount of 

 violence for its realization. 



