England, at least, may afford now to acknowledge Mohammedanism as
something not to be merely combated and destroyed, but to be accepted by
her and encouraged--accepted as a fact which for good or evil will exist
in the world whether she will or no--encouraged because it has in it
possibilities of good which she cannot replace by any creed or
philosophy of her own. She can do much to help these possibilities, for
they depend for the moment on her political action. There is a good
cause and a bad in Islam as elsewhere in the world, and though hitherto
England's physical help has been given all to evil, it has been through
ignorance of the issues at stake; and I am confident that as she learns
these, she will acknowledge the wrong she has unconsciously been doing,
and repair while there is yet time her error.

In my next and concluding chapter I propose to sketch a policy towards
Islam worthy of England's high sense of duty, and conformable to her
true interests.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] A remarkable coincidence of prediction, Christian and Mohammedan,
has been pointed out to me in Rohrbacher's History of the Church,
published in 1845, where by an elaborate calculation based on the Old
Testament prophecies he arrives at the conclusion that the Turkish
Empire will fall in 1882, the date assigned it also by the Mohammedan
prediction quoted in my last chapter--that is to say A.H. 1300.

[17] This claim has been endorsed by Abd el Mutalleb, who is issuing a
_Resalat rayiyeh_, or pastoral letter, this year to the pilgrims in
support of Abd el Hamid's Caliphate.

CHAPTER V.

ENGLAND'S INTEREST IN ISLAM.

Nothing now remains for me but to point the moral which these essays
were designed to draw. It will have been observed that hitherto I have
avoided as much as possible all allusion to the direct political action
which Christendom is exercising, and must ever more and more exercise,
upon the fortunes of Islam; and in this I have been guided by two
motives. I have wished, first, to give prominence to the fact that in
all great movements of the human intellect the force of progression or
decay should be looked for mainly from within, not from without; and,
secondly, to simplify my subject so as to render it more easily
intelligible to the reading public. We have reached, however, the point
now when it will be necessary to take different ground, and look at
Islam no longer as regards her internal economy, but as she is bei