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But it was a quaint sensation to sit in a Mosque, behaving as if at an evening party, in a little circle of poor Moslim priests. I am going to have a photograph of my cart done. Such a handsome fellow may be allowed a little vanity. The colony is torn with dissensions as to Sunday trains. Some of the Dutch clergy are even more absurd than our own on that point.
Both parties are almost equally concerned in the question, whether a way will be found to associate the Moslim world to modern civilization, without obliging it to empty its spiritual treasury altogether. Nobody can in earnest advocate the idea of leaving the solution of the problem to rude force.
In the Turkish Empire, in Egypt, in many Mohammedan countries under Western control, the progressive elements of Moslim society spontaneously meet us half-way.
In the first years of the strife yet another duty was most emphatically impressed on the Faithful; jihad, i.e., readiness to sacrifice life and possessions for the defence of Islam, understood, since the conquest of Mecca in 630, as the extension by force of arms of the authority of the Moslim state, first over the whole of Arabia, and soon after Mohammed's death over the whole world, so far as Allah granted His hosts the victory.
In fact, the diversity of spiritual tendencies is not less in the Moslim world than within the sphere of Christian influence; but in Islam, apart from the political schisms of the first centuries, that diversity has not given rise to anything like the division of Christianity into sects.
Some years ago an English ship was wrecked near Djidda, and among various spoils obtained from the wreck by Sherif Ghaleb was a large hog, an animal probably never before seen at Djidda: this hog, turned loose in the town with two ostriches, became the terror of all the sellers of bread and vegetables; for the mere touching of so unclean an animal as the hog, even with the edge of the gown, renders the Moslim impure, and unable to perform his prayers without previous ablution.
They see the antagonism to all foreign ideas, formerly considered as a virtue by every true Moslim, daily losing ground, and they are filled with consternation by observing in their own ranks the contamination of modernist ideas.
"Mubarek was a young man of very hot blood and fierce passions, and being brought up a strict Moslim, he was so much enraged at the Queen's scoff, that no sooner were the words out of her mouth, than drawing instantly a jewelled dagger which she wore at her girdle, he plunged it into her heart.
Indeed so rich is Medina in the remains of great saints that they have almost lost their individual importance, while the relics of one of the persons just mentioned would be sufficient to render celebrated any other Moslim town.
The Moslim of yore, going through the world with the Qoran in one hand, the sword in the other, giving unbelievers the choice between conversion or death, is a creation of legendary fancy. We can but hope that modern civilization will not be so fanatical against Moslims, as the latter were unjustly said to have been during the period of their power.
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