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Updated: June 15, 2025
Islam's solidarity is powerfully buttressed by two of its fundamental institutions: the "Hajj," or pilgrimage to Mecca, and the caliphate. Contrary to the general opinion in the West, it is the Hajj rather than the caliphate which has exerted the more consistently unifying influence.
Far from it. On the contrary, they are ceaselessly at work with the spiritual arms of teaching, discipline, and conversion. The Sennussi programme is the welding, first, of Moslem Africa and, later, of the whole Moslem world into the revived "Imâmât" of Islam's early days; into a great theocracy, embracing all True Believers in other words, Pan-Islamism.
Compare the sheriat with the Christian canon law. The spirit is the same. Take, for example, the sheriat's prohibition on the lending of money at interest; a prohibition which, if obeyed, renders impossible anything like business or industry in the modern sense. This is the example oftenest cited to prove Islam's innate incompatibility with modern civilization.
We must always remember that the Asiatic stocks which constitute the bulk of Islam's followers are not primitive savages like the African negroes or the Australoids, but are mainly peoples with genuine civilizations built up by their own efforts from the remote past.
The ubiquitous impact of Westernism is modifying not merely the Islamic world but all non-Moslem Asia and Africa, and in subsequent pages we shall examine the effects of Western influence upon the non-Moslem elements of India. Of course Western influence does not entirely account for Islam's recent evolution.
He laments Islam's present backwardness, for he continues: "Modern Islam, with its hierarchy of priesthood, gross fanaticism, appalling ignorance, and superstitious practices is, indeed, a discredit to the Islam of the Prophet Mohammed." He concludes with the following liberal confession of faith: "Is Islam hostile to progress? I will emphatically answer this question in the negative.
Let us now examine the views of those who hold a more optimistic attitude. Some observers stress strongly Islam's liberal tendencies as a foundation on which to erect political structures in the modern sense. Vambéry says, "Islam is still the most democratic religion in the world, a religion favouring both liberty and equality.
Shaken by the civil wars, bereft of strong leaders, and deprived of the invigorating amalgam of the unspoiled desert Arabs, political unity could not endure. Everywhere there occurred revivals of suppressed racial or particularist tendencies. The very rapidity of Islam's expansion turned against it, now that the well-springs of that expansion were dried up.
Of all the rides since the birth of time, Told in story or sung in rhyme, On Apuleius's Golden Ass, Or one-eyed Calendar's horse of brass, Witch astride of a human hack, Islam's prophet on Al-Borák, The strangest ride that ever was sped Was Ireson's out from Marblehead! Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart, Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart By the women of Marblehead!
Meanwhile they are covering North Africa with their lodges and schools, disciplining the people to the voice of their Mokaddems and Wekils; and, to the southward, converting millions of pagan negroes to the faith of Islam. Nothing better shows modern Islam's quickened vitality than the revival of missionary fervour during the past hundred years.
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