The mainstay of the Mogrebbin Haj are the Moors.  These have an immense name for zeal and religious courage at Mecca, and for the great scrupulosity with which they perform their religious duties.  There is too among the Moors a far wider level of theological education than among most Mussulmans.  I made acquaintance while at Jeddah with a young Arab from Shinghiat in Senegal who, Bedouin as he was, was an Alem, and one sufficiently well versed in the Sheriat to be referred to more than once in my presence on points of religious law and literature.  I expressed my surprise at finding a Bedouin thus learned, for he was evidently an Arab of the Arabs, but he told me his was no exceptional position, and that most Bedouins in Southern Morocco could read the Koran.  The Moors would have a still higher position in Islam than that already given them were it not that they are on one point at variance with the mass of Sunites.  They do not acknowledge the modern Caliphate.  Those therefore of the Sunites who have acknowledged the Ottoman claim are at issue with the Moors.  On all other points, however, the Moors are Sunites of the Sunites.

From the Moor to the negro is but a step, though it is a step of race, perhaps of species.  The political and religious connection of Morocco with the Soudan is a very close one, and, whatever may be the future of the Mediterranean provinces fronting the Spanish coast, it cannot be doubted that the Moorish form of Mohammedanism will be perpetuated in Central Africa.  It is there, indeed, that Islam has the best certainty of expansion and the fairest field for a propagation of its creed.  Statistics, if they could be obtained, would, I am convinced, show an immense Mohammedan progress within the last hundred years among the negro races, nor is this to be wondered at.  Islam has so much to offer to the children of Ham that it cannot fail to win them—­so much more than any form of Christianity or European progress can give.

The Christian missionary makes his way slowly in Africa.  He has no true brotherhood to offer the negro except in another life.  He makes no appeal to a present sense of dignity in the man he would convert.  What Christian missionary takes a negress to wife or sits with the negro wholly as an equal at meat?  Their relations remain at best those of teacher with taught, master with servant, grown man with child.  The Mohammedan missionary from Morocco meanwhile stands on a different footing.  He says to the negro, “Come up and sit beside me.  Give me your daughter and take mine.  All who pronounce the formula of Islam are equal in this world and in the next.”  In becoming a Mussulman even a slave acquires immediate dignity and the right to despise all men, whatever their colour, who are not as himself.  This is a bribe in the hand of the preacher of the Koran, and one which has never appealed in vain to the enslaved races of the world.[5] Central Africa then may be counted on as the inheritance of Islam at no very distant day.  It is already said to count ten millions of Moslems.