d not begun to be questioned, and he was perfectly justified in citing
it as the only rule recognized by the mass of the orthodox. No such
thing as a liberal religious party then existed anywhere, and those who
broke the law in the name of political reform were breakers of the law
and nothing more. Every good man was their enemy, and if any spoke of
liberty he was understood as meaning licence. It was not even conceived
then that the Sheriat might be legally remodelled. Now, however, and
especially within the last ten years, a large section of godly and
legal-minded men have ranged themselves on the side of liberal opinion,
and serious attempts have been made to reconcile a desire of improvement
with unabated loyalty to Islam.

A true liberal party has thus been formed, which includes in its ranks
not merely political intriguers of the type familiar to Europe in Midhat
Pasha, but men of sincere piety, who would introduce moral as well as
political reforms into the practice of Mohammedans. These have it in
their programme to make the practice of religion more austere while
widening its basis, to free the intelligence of believers from
scholastic trammels, and at the same time to enforce more strictly the
higher moral law of the Koran, which has been so long and so strangely
violated. In this they stand in close resemblance to the "Reformers" of
Christianity; and some of the circumstances which have given them birth
are so analogous to those which Europe encountered in the fifteenth
century that it is impossible not to draw in one's own mind a parallel,
leading to the conviction that Islam, too, will work out for itself a
Reformation.

The two chief agents of religious reform in Europe were the misery of
the poor and the general spread of knowledge. It is difficult at this
distance of time to conceive how abject was the general state of the
European peasantry in the days of Louis XI. of France and Frederick III.
of Germany. The constant wars and almost as constant famines, the
general insecurity of the conditions of life, the dependence of a vast
majority of the poor on capricious patrons, the hideous growth of
corruption and licentiousness in the ruling classes, and the impotence
of the ruled to obtain justice, above all, the servile acquiescence of
religion, which should have protected them, in the political
illegalities daily witnessed--all these things, stirring the hearts of
men, caused them to cry out against the e