Politically, too, it was the cause of their ruin.  The outside Mussulman world, looking upon them as sacrilegious barbarians, was afraid to visit Mecca, and the pilgrimage declined so rapidly that the Hejazi became alarmed.  The source of their revenue they found cut off, and it seemed on the point of ceasing altogether.  Then they appealed to Constantinople, urging the Sultan to vindicate his claim to be protector of the holy places.  What followed is well known.  After the peace of Paris Sultan Mahmud commissioned Mehemet Ali to deliver Mecca and Medina from the Wahhabite heretics, and this he in time effected.  The war was carried into Nejd; Deriyeh, their capital, was sacked, and Ibn Saoud himself taken prisoner and decapitated in front of St. Sophia’s at Constantinople.  The movement of reform in Islam was thus put back for, perhaps, another hundred years.

Still the seed cast by Abd el Wahhab has not been entirely without fruit.  Wahhabism, as a political regeneration of the world, has failed, but the spirit of reform has remained.  Indeed, the present unquiet attitude of expectation in Islam has been its indirect result.  Just as the Lutheran reformation in Europe, though it failed to convert the Christian Church, caused its real reform, so Wahhabism has produced a real desire for reform if not yet reform itself in Mussulmans.  Islam is no longer asleep, and were another and a wiser Abd el Wahhab to appear, not as a heretic, but in the body of the Orthodox sect, he might play the part of Loyola or Borromeo with success.

The present condition of the Wahhabites as a sect is one of decline.  In India, and I believe in other parts of Southern Asia, their missionaries still make converts and their preachers are held in high esteem.  But at home in Arabia their zeal has waxed cold, giving place to liberal ideas which in truth are far more congenial to the Arabian mind.  The Ibn Saoud dynasty no longer holds the first position in Nejd, and Ibn Rashid who has taken their place, though nominally a Wahhabite, has little of the Wahhabite fanaticism.  He is in fact a popular and national rather than a religious leader, and though still designated at Constantinople as a pestilent heretic, is counted as their ally by the more liberal Sunites.  It is probable that he would not withhold his allegiance from a Caliph of the legitimate house of Koreysh.  But this, too, is beyond the subject of the present chapter.

With the Wahhabites, then, our census of Islam closes.  It has given us, as I hope, a fairly accurate view of the forces which make up the Mohammedan world, and though the enumeration of these cannot but be dull work, I do not think it will have been work done in vain.  Without it indeed it would be almost impossible to make clear the problem presented to us by modern Islam or guess its solution.  More interesting matter, however, lies before us, and in my next chapter I propose to introduce my reader to that burning question of the day in Asia, the Caliphate, and explain the position of the House of Othman towards the Mohammedan world.