he design of gaining more accurate
knowledge than I could find elsewhere on the subject of this Mohammedan
revival that I visited Jeddah in the early part of the past winter, and
that I subsequently spent some months in Egypt and Syria in the almost
exclusive society of Mussulmans. Jeddah, I argued, the seaport of Mecca
and only forty miles distant from that famous centre of the Moslem
universe, would be the most convenient spot from which I could obtain
such a bird's-eye view of Islam as I was in search of; and I imagined
rightly that I should there find myself in an atmosphere less provincial
than that of Cairo, or Bagdad, or Constantinople.

Jeddah is indeed in the pilgrim season the suburb of a great metropolis,
and even a European stranger there feels that he is no longer in a world
of little thoughts and local aspirations. On every side the politics he
hears discussed are those of the great world, and the religion
professed is that of a wider Islam than he has been accustomed to in
Turkey or in India. There every race and language are represented, and
every sect. Indians, Persians, Moors, are there,--negroes from the
Niger, Malays from Java, Tartars from the Khanates, Arabs from the
French Sahara, from Oman and Zanzibar, even, in Chinese dress and
undistinguishable from other natives of the Celestial Empire, Mussulmans
from the interior of China. As one meets these walking in the streets,
one's view of Islam becomes suddenly enlarged, and one finds oneself
exclaiming with Sir Thomas Browne, "Truly the (Mussulman) world is
greater than that part of it geographers have described." The permanent
population, too, of Jeddah is a microcosm of Islam. It is made up of
individuals from every nation under heaven. Besides the indigenous Arab,
who has given his language and his tone of thought to the rest, there is
a mixed resident multitude descended from the countless pilgrims who
have remained to live and die in the holy cities. These preserve, to a
certain extent, their individuality, at least for a generation or two,
and maintain a connection with the lands to which they owe their origin
and the people who were their countrymen. Thus there is constantly
found at Jeddah a free mart of intelligence for all that is happening in
the world; and the common gossip of the bazaar retails news from every
corner of the Mussulman earth. It is hardly too much to say that one can
learn more of modern Islam in a week at Jeddah than in a