e
declamation of this young priest, with his face of visionary, and garb
of decent poverty, swells involuntarily, till gradually it seems to fill
the seven deserted aisles of El-Azhar.

We stop in spite of ourselves, and listen, in the midst of the silence
of midday. And in this so venerable place, where dilapidation and
the usury of centuries are revealed on every side--even on the marble
columns worn by the constant friction of hands--this voice of gold
that rises alone seems as if it were intoning the last lament over the
death-pang of Old Islam and the end of time, the elegy, as it were, of
the universal death of faith in the heart of man.

*****

"Science is one religion; prayer is another. Study is better than
worship. Go; seek knowledge everywhere, if needs be, even into China."

Verses from the Hadith.

Amongst us Europeans it is commonly accepted as a proven fact that
Islam is merely a religion of obscurantism, bringing in its train the
stagnation of nations, and hampering them in that march to the unknown
which we call "progress." But such an attitude shows not only an
absolute ignorance of the teaching of the Prophet, but a blind
forgetfulness of the evidence of history. The Islam of the earlier
centuries evolved and progressed with the nations, and the stimulus it
gave to men in the reign of the ancient caliphs is beyond all question.
To impute to it the present decadence of the Moslem world is altogether
too puerile. The truth is that nations have their day; and to a period
of glorious splendour succeeds a time of lassitude and slumber. It is a
law of nature. And then one day some danger threatens them, stirs them
from their torpor and they awake.

This immobility of the countries of the Crescent was once dear to me.
If the end is to pass through life with the minimum of suffering,
disdaining all vain striving, and to die entranced by radiant hopes, the
Orientals are the only wise men. But now that greedy nations beset them
on all sides their dreaming is no longer possible. They must awake,
alas.

They must awake; and already the awakening is at hand. Here, in Egypt,
where the need is felt to change so many things, it is proposed, too,
to reform the old university of El-Azhar, one of the chief centres of
Islam. One thinks of it with a kind of fear, knowing what danger there
is in laying hands upon institutions which have lasted for a thousand
years. Reform, however, has, in principle, been decided