The way in which the most important mufti places are filled and above all the position which the head-mufti of the Turkish Empire, the Sheikh-ul-Islam, holds at any particular period, may well serve as a touchstone of the influence of the canonists on public life.  If this is great, then even the most powerful sultan has only the possibility of choice between a few great scholars, put forward or at all events not disapproved of by their own guild, strengthened by public opinion.  If, on the other hand, there is no keen interest felt in the Shari’ah (Divine Law), then the temporal rulers can do pretty much what they like with these representatives of the canon law.  Under the tyrannical sway of Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid, the Sheikh-ul-Islam was little more than a tool for him and his palace clique, and for their own reasons, the members of the Committee of Union and Progress, who rule at Constantinople since 1908, made no change in this:  each new ministry had its own Sheikh-ul-Islam, who had to be, above everything, a faithful upholder of the constitutional theory held by the Committee.  The time is past when the Sultan and the Porte, in framing even the most pressing reform, must first anxiously assure themselves of the position that the hojas, tolbas, softas, the theologians in a word, would take towards it, and of the influence that the Sheikh-ul-Islam could use in opposition to their plans.  The political authority makes its deference to the canonists dependent upon their strict obedience.

This important change is a natural consequence of the modernization of Mohammedan political life, a movement through which the expounders of a law which has endeavoured to remain stationary since the year 1000 must necessarily get into straits.  This explains also why the religious life of Mohammedans is in some respects freer in countries under non-Mohammedan authority, than under a Mohammedan government.  Under English, Dutch, or French rule the ’ulamas are less interfered with in their teaching, the muftis in their recommendations, and the qadhis in their judgments of questions of marriage and inheritance than in Turkey, where the life of Islam, as state religion, lies under official control.  In indirectly governed “native states” the relation of Mohammedan “Church and State” may much more resemble that in Turkey, and this is sometimes to the advantage of the sovereign ruler.  Under the direct government of a modern state, the Mohammedan group is treated as a religious community, whose particular life has just the same claim to independence as that of other denominations.  The only justifiable limitation is that the program of the forcible reduction of the world to Mohammedan authority be kept within the scholastic walls as a point of eschatology, and not considered as a body of prescriptions, the execution of which must be prepared.