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In India the mass of the Mussulman population is Shafite, especially in Hyderabad and the Bombay Presidency, where the Arab element is strongest, while Hanefism is the school of the great people who derive their origin from the Mogul conquests, and of many of the Ulema who are in the habit of making their religious education complete in the Hanefite schools of Bokhara.
But the Hanefite Ulema were not thus to be satisfied.
Bokhara may lose its political independence, but there is no probability for many generations to come of its being Christianized as Constantinople certainly must be, and it may even on the fall of the latter become the chief centre of Sunite orthodoxy of the existing Hanefite type, remaining so perhaps long after the rest of Islam shall have abandoned Hanefism.
Soliman the Magnificent, Selim's heir, especially insisted upon this. He had already promulgated a series of decrees affecting the civil administration of his empire, which he had declared to be immutable; and an immutability, too, in dogma he thought would still further secure the peace and stability of his rule. Nor did he meet with aught but approval here from the Hanefite divines.
The exact composition of the Azhar university is as follows. Of the five hundred and odd sheykhs or professors, two hundred are Shafite, two hundred Malekite, one hundred Hanefite, and five Hanbalite. Each of these sections has a supreme sheykh, chosen by itself, whose fetwa on questions concerning the school is decisive.
The official classes, too, in most parts of the world are Hanefite, including the Viceregal courts of Egypt, Tripoli, and Tunis, and it would seem the courts of most of the Indian princes. It is probably rather as a consequence of this than as its reason that it is the most conservative of schools, conservative in the true sense of leaving things exactly as they are.
Missionaries were consequently despatched to every part of the Mussulman world, and especially to India and the Barbary States, to explain the Hanefite dogma of the Caliphate; and though at first these met with little success they eventually gained their object in those countries where believers were obliged to live under infidel rule, so much so that in a few years the Ottoman Caliphate became once more a recognized "question" in the schools.
The too venturous Arnaout was sent back to his vice-royalty in Egypt, and the House of Othman was entrusted with a new lease of spiritual sovereignty, if not yet of spiritual power. The reigns of Abd el Mejid and of Abd el Aziz are remarkable with Mussulmans as having witnessed a complete dissociation of interests between the Imperial Government and the Old Hanefite school of Ulema.
There is, moreover, a Sheykh el Islam, also elected, who decides religious questions of general importance, and a Grand Mufti appointed by the Government who gives fetwas on matters of law. The latter is Hanefite, the former at the present moment Shafite, as are the bulk of the students. These number about fifteen hundred.
Turkey, I have shown, and the Hanefite school, are far from being the whole of the Mohammedan world; and side by side with the fanatical obduracy of the Ottoman State party and the still fiercer puritanism of the Melkites there exists an intelligent and hopeful party favourable to religious reform. Shafite Egypt is its stronghold, but it is powerful too in Arabia and further East.
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