It is obvious that, unless we can answer this in the affirmative, none of the changes I have been prefiguring will very much affect her ultimate fortunes—­neither the solution of her legal deadlock with the Ottoman Caliphate, nor the transfer of her metropolis to a new centre, nor even the triumph of her arms, if such were possible, in Africa or India.  These by themselves could, at best, only delay her decline.  They might even precipitate her ruin.  Islam, if she relies only on the sword, must in the end perish by it, for her forces, vast as they are, are without physical cohesion, being scattered widely over the surface of three continents and divided by insuperable accidents of seas and deserts; and the enemy she would have to face is intelligent as well as strong, and would not let her rest.  Already what is called the “Progress of the World” envelopes her with its ships and its commerce, and, above all, with its printed thought, which she is beginning to read.  Nor is it likely in the future to affect her less.  Every year as it goes by carries her farther from the possibility of isolation, and forces on her new acquaintances, not only her old foes, the Frank and Muscovite, but the German, the Chinaman, and the American, with all of whom she may have in turn to count.  If she would not be strangled by these influences she must use other arms than those of the flesh, and meet the intellectual invasion of her frontiers with a corresponding intelligence.  Otherwise she has nothing to look forward to but a gradual decay, spiritual as well as political.  Her law must become little by little a dead letter, her Caliphate an obsolete survival, and her creed a mere opinion.  Islam as a living and controlling moral force in the world would then gradually cease.

In expressing my conviction that Islam is not thus destined yet awhile to perish I believe that I am running counter to much high authority among my countrymen.  I know that it is a received opinion with those best qualified to instruct the public that Islam is in its constitution unamenable to change, and by consequence to progressive life, or even, in the face of hostile elements, to prolonged life at all.  Students of the Sheriat have not inaptly compared the Koranic law to a dead man’s hand, rigid and cold, and only to be loosened when the hand itself shall have been cut away.  It has been asserted that the first rule of Mohammedan thought has been that change was inadmissible, and development of religious practice, either to right or left of the narrow path of mediaeval scholasticism, absolutely precluded.  I know this, and I know, too, that a vast array of learned Mohammedan opinion can be cited to prove this to be the case, and that very few of the modern Ulema of any school of divinity would venture openly to impugn its truth.  Nor have I forgotten the repeated failure of attempts made in Turkey within the last fifty years to gain religious assent to the various legal innovations decreed by Sultan after Sultan in deference to the will of Europe, nor the fate which has sometimes overtaken those who were the advocates of change.  I know, according to all rule written and spoken by the orthodox, that Islam cannot move, and yet in spite of it I answer with some confidence in the fashion of Galileo, “E pur si muove.”